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COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr. 



English Essayists 

A Reader 5 Handbook 



By 

WILLIAM HAWLEY DAVIS, A.M. 

of Bowdoin College 




BOSTON: RICHARD G. BADGER 
THE GORHAM PRESS 

TORONTO: THE COPP CLARK CO., LIMITED 



Copyright, 1916, by Richard G. Badger 



All Rights Reserved 






^^ 




DEC II 1318 



The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 



Made in the United States of America 
©GI.A453022 



PREFACE 

npHIS is a handbook for readers of English es- 
-^ says. The compiler knows of few things more 
subject to abuse than books about books. If used 
independently, or deliberately read from cover to cover 
and dismissed with that, this book, he thinks, will be 
abused. It is intended to accompany the reading of 
essays, and to serve as a sort of reading-glass for the 
clearer disclosure of their distinguishing character- 
istics, their merits, their delights. For experienced 
readers of essays it offers little; beginners and occa- 
sional readers it should serve to make rapidly more 
experienced. 

A meritorious essay, like any other piece of real 
literature, has distinction and worth quite apart from 
other essays and from the author who wrote it. More 
definitely than most kinds of literature, however, the 
essay acquires added interest from a knowledge of 
other essays and from acquaintance with the author 
as a man. The subjective quality of the essay, the 
painting of self which philosophy no less than tradi- 
tion assigns to it as a distinguishing feature, makes 
the reason for this readily apparent. In order to ap- 
preciate Of Studies and Von Ranke's History of the 
Popes to the full, one needs to know how each is re- 
lated to other essays; to enjoy Mrs. Battle, The 



iv PREFACE 

Daughter of Lebanon, or Walking Tours to the ut- 
most, one needs to have definite impressions of Charles 
Lamb, of Thomas De Quincey, of Robert Louis Stev- 
enson. 

No further apology need be offered for a hand- 
book of the English essay. 

W. H. D. 

October, 1916, 



CONTENTS 



Preface 



I. Origin and Early Exponents 
Montaigne .... 
Bacon ..... 
Cowley ..... 

II. Eighteenth Century Essayists 
Steele and Addison 
Johnson .... 

Goldsmith .... 

III. Nineteenth Century Essayists 
Lamb . 
Hazlitt . 
Irving . 
Hunt . 
De Quincey 
Carlyle 
Macaulay 
Newman 
Emerson 
Thackeray 
Ruskin 
Arnold 
Stevenson 

Appendix I, Kinds of Essays 

Appendix II, Minor English Essayists 
Seventeenth Century 
Eighteenth Century 
Nineteenth Century 

Appendix III, Contemporary Essayists 

Index 

V 



PAGK 

i 

I 

4 
9 

12 

25 

30 

35 

45 

57 

71 

84 

95 

112 

122 

135 

151 

161 

172 

185 

196 

198 
199 
201 

205 

209 



"There is in him that which does not die ; that Beauty and 
Earnestness of soul, that spirit of Humanity, of Love and 
mild Wisdom, over which the vicissitudes of mode have no 
sway. This is that excellence of the inmost nature which 
alone confers immortality on writings." 

Thomas Carlyle: Richter. 



ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 



I. ORIGIN AND EARLY EXPONENTS 

THE essay is, of course, not peculiarly the product 
of England. Writings resembling modern es- 
says may be traced at least as far back as the Epistles 
of Seneca (died A. D. 65). And it was a modern 
Frenchman who first made use of the title Essays 
(Essais), who first gave to this type of literary compo- 
sition a definite vogue, and who has been looked up to 
by English essayists as their literary father. This 
Frenchman, Michel de Montaigne (1533- 1592), may 
properly be considered the originator of the essay. 

In 1 57 1, under circumstances which he himself de- 
scribes, Montaigne composed the earliest of his essays. 
In 1580, a volume of his essays was published at Bor- 
deaux. Copies were undoubtedly soon conveyed to 
England. In 1603, an English translation appeared: 
William Shakespeare quite certainly possessed a copy. 
Bacon and later writers frequently refer to Montaigne. 
It is important, therefore, to observe the nature and 
the intentions of the man who hit upon this new and 
enduring kind of literary composition. 

Superficially regarded, Montaigne was a well-edu- 
cated gentleman of active intellect and facile pen, living, 



2 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

in retirement, and finding in the occupation of writing 
an interesting diversion. In his essay Of Idleness, he 
says: 

"When I lately retired myself to my own house, with a 
resolution, as much as possibly I could, to avoid all manner 
of concern in affairs, and to spend in privacy and repose 
the little remainder of time I had to live, I fancied I could 
not more oblige my mind than to suffer it at full leisure to 
entertain and divert itself, which I hoped it might now the 
better be entrusted to do, as being by time and observation 
become more settled and mature; but I find, 

'Veriam semper dant otia mentem.' 
'E'en in the most retir'd estate 
Leisure itself does various thoughts create:' 
that, quite the contrary, it is like a horse having broken 
from his rider, who voluntarily runs into a much wilder 
career than any horseman would put him to, and creates me 
so many chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, 
without order or design, that, the better at leisure to con- 
template their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to 
commit them to writing, hoping in time to make them 
ashamed of themselves." 

More deeply considered, Montaigne was a man of 
singular independence of mind and singular frankness 
of disposition. He adopted as his motto, "Que s^ais- 
je?", "What do I know?" ; he refused to accept merely 
on the authority of others statements not verified by 
his own experience. 

Emerson imagines Montaigne saying to himself : 

"I stand here for truth, and will not, for all the states, 
and churches, and revenues, and personal reputations of 
Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I see it; I will rather 



ORIGIN AND EARLY EXPONENTS 3 

mumble and prose about what I certainly know, — my house 
and barns; my father, my wife, and my tenants; my old lean 
bald pate ; my knives and forks ; what meats I eat, and what 
drinks I prefer; and a hundred straws just as ridiculous, — • 
than I will write, with a fine crow-quill, a fine romance. I 
like gray days, and autumn and winter weather. I am gray 
and autumnal myself, and I think an undress, and old shoes 
that do not pinch my feet, and old friends who do not con- 
strain me, and plain topics where I do not need to strain 
myself and pump my brains, the most suitable." 

And Emerson continues: 

"The 'Essays,' therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on 
every random topic that comes into his head ; treating every- 
thing without ceremony, yet with masculine sense." 

Emerson here expresses one quality of the essay as 
developed by Montaigne. Another important quality 
is pointedly expressed by Montaigne himself in his 
Author to the Reader: 

"This, reader, is a book without guile. It tells thee, at 
the very outset, that I had no other end in putting it together 
but what was domestic and private. ... It was intended for 
the particular use of my relations and friends, in order that, 
when they have lost me, which they must soon do, they may 
here find some traces of my quality and humor, and may 
therefore nourish a more entire and lively recollection of 
me . . . 'twas my wish to be seen in my simple, natural, 
and ordinary garb, without study or artifice, for 'twas myself 
I had to paint. . . . Thus, reader, thou perceivest I am 
myself the subject of my book. ..." 

The random nature of the topics treated, and the un- 
disguised revelation of himself, are two striking char- 



4 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

acteristics of Montaigne's essays. Two others are the 
marked extent to which he fortifies his opinions by ex- 
amples and testimony from classical authors, and the 
aptness and general attractiveness of his writing. 

Such, then, in brief, was the essay as it was first 
developed. It was not systematic in arrangement. It 
was not didactic, educational, in its purpose. It was 
in prose. It was not romance, although it included 
much that was narration. Each topic was treated 
briefly, not comprehensively. The impression left 
upon the reader was less of the subject discussed than 
of the man writing. 

With comparatively insignificant variations, which 
may be noted as the essay is traced down the centuries, 
the type has persisted to the present day essentially as 
devised by Montaigne.^ 

FRANCIS, LORD BACON (1561-1626) 

Chronology 

1561 Born, January 22, London; son of Lord Keeper. 

1573-1575 At Trinity College, Cambridge. 1575, to Gray's 
Inn. 

1582 Barrister. 1584, elected to Parliament. Ambitious 
as a student; pecuniary troubles. Friendship 
with Earl of Essex. 

1597 Essays or Counsells, Civill and Morall (10). Re- 
printed and enlarged, 1612 (38) ; 1625 (58). 
Betrayed Essex. Political activity. One of 
Queen's Learned Counsel. 

1603 Accession of James. Bacon in favor. 

* Montaigne's Essais were republished in 1588 and in 1596. 
Important translations since Florio's (1603) are one by Charles 
Cotton (1680); and one by William Hazlitt, son of the essay- 
ist (1841), a revision,, merely, of, Cotton's., 



ORIGIN AND EARLY EXPONENTS S 

1605 Advancement of Learning. 1606, Solicitor Gen- 
eral. 

1613 Attorney General. Struggle with Coke over rela- 
tive positions of judges and Crown. 

1617 Lord Keeper. 1618, Lord Chancellor. Baron 
Verulam. Conducted prosecution of Raleigh. 

1620 Novum Organum. 1621, Viscount St. Albans. 
Disclosures of bribery. Convicted. Fined, im- 
prisoned. History of Henry VII. 

1623 Advancement of Learning in Latin. 

1625 Refused a pardon. 

1626 Died, April 9, from exposure while conducting a 

scientific experiment. 

The essays of Sir Francis Bacon are usually con- 
sidered as belonging to the type of literature origin- 
ated by Montaigne. It may readily be maintained 
that posterity has here been deceived by a name. The 
personal, the subjective element so marked in the case 
of "essays" is in Bacon insignificant.^ Thought and 
expression alike in Bacon resemble the Book of 
Proverbs, the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, rather 
than the more or less whimsical, always flowing,, 
seldom formal writing of other essayists. It appears 
that whereas Montaigne used the term essai in its 

* A letter intended by him to serve as the Dedicatory Epistle 
to the 1612 edition contains the following: "To write just 
treatises, requireth leisure in the writer, and leisure in the 
reader, and therefore are not so fit, neither in regard of your 
highness's princely aflfairs, nor in regard of my continual service; 
which is the cause that hath made me choose to write certain 
brief notes, set down rather significantly than curiously, which 
I have called Essays. The word is late, but the thing is ancient ; 
for Seneca's Epistles to Lucilius, if you mark them well, are but 
essays, that is, dispersed meditations, though conveyed in the 
form of epistles." 



6 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

original Latin sense of exagium, a weighing or balanc- 
ing (his motto appeared beneath the device of a pair 
of scales), Bacon plainly used the term essay in the 
sense of experiment or trial, an essay toward a com- 
plete treatment: he spoke of his essays as being not 
"just treatises," but "brief notes," as "dispersed medi- 
tations," that is, scattered thoughts. In so far, to 
be sure, as they "come home to men's business and 
bosoms" ^ and present things "whereof a man shall 
find much in experience, and little in books," ^ they 
do resemble Montaigne's. On the whole, however. 
Bacon's essays seem themselves to represent an orig- 
inal experiment in writing English, one of the experi- 
ments with the vernacular so common in Elizabethan 
times, an experiment of permanent value and signifi- 
cance, yet virtually unique in English literature, and 
not strictly belonging to the field of the English 
Essay. ^ 

No book on the Essay, however, can as yet omit 
to treat of Francis Bacon. 

Lord Bacon has four claims to greatness : his 
achievements as a statesman, his record as a phi- 
losopher and scientist, his work as a historian, and — 
a claim with which each of the others is closely con- 
nected — the writing of his Essays or Counsells, Civill 
and Morall. 

* Dedication of 1625 Edition. 

* Epistle referred to above. 

*Cf. The Rise of English Literary Prose, by G. P. Krapp, 
Oxford University Press, 1915, the chapter on Bacon, pp. 
535-541. 



ORIGIN AND EARLY EXPONENTS 7 

As an able son of the Lord Keeper of the Privy 
Seal, Francis Bacon entered early upon public life. 
A barrister at twenty-one, he was elected to Parlia- 
ment two years later. Some opposition which he 
offered to certain of Queen Elizabeth's plans, pre- 
vented the rapid rise to which his talents entitled him. 
He did become, in 1595, one of the Queen's Learned 
Counsel. In this capacity he conducted the successful 
prosecution of his friend and benefactor, the Earl of 
Essex, on trial for acts which Bacon had encouraged 
him to commit. But the Queen died without granting 
Bacon any signal favor. 

Under James he rose gradually to the position of 
Lord Chancellor and was created Baron Verulam 
(16 18). From the chancellorship he was deposed 
(1621), following his trial and conviction, before 
hostile judges, for bribery. The cause of his downfall 
is discoverable not only in his own acts, but in the 
growth of democratic sentiment in England. Bacon 
had persistently fought for intelligent exaltation of 
royal power above popular control in both Parliament 
and the courts. In so far as he was guilty, he had 
but conformed to a custom of the times. He had been 
imprudent but not base, he was less a culprit than a 
victim. As a statesman his conceptions were wise 
and his achievements noteworthy. 

Throughout his life he had dearly cherished the 
thought of retiring on means sufficient to enable him 
to study and write. This he was never able to do. 
In all available intervals, however, he devoted him- 
self to questions of philosophy and natural science. 



8 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

He took "all knowledge for his province." And such 
were his insight and his foresight that he laid founda- 
tions in thought for inductive science, the first-hand 
observation and study of nature. He considered the 
accounts of life and of nature already existing as 
"pretty and probable conjectures." ^ As a means of 
securing "certain and demonstrable knowledge," he 
advocated the method which "derives axioms from 
the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and 
unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general 
actions last of all." ^ He was able to make only the 
crudest applications of the method ; he died from 
exposure encountered while stuffing a fresh-killed 
chicken with snow in order to test the effect of cold 
as a preservative of animal tissues. But the method 
is that of Darwin and of all modern science. 

As a historian his most important work is a History 
of Henry VH, written after his deposition. In ac- 
curacy, justice, and penetration it is of the highest 
rank. It is regrettable that his proposed History of 
Henry VIII was never written. 

The experience of the statesman, the wisdom of 
the philosopher, the justice and expressiveness of the 
historian, find their confluence in Bacon's Essays. 
What in the first (1596) edition had been little more 
than rough accumulations of aphorisms — "fragments 
of his conceits," ^ in the later editions became more 
continuous and more rounded — "the best fruits, that 

^ Novum Organum, Preface. 

* Aphorisms, xix. - , • . 

» Dedicatory Epistle. 



ORIGIN AND EARLY EXPONENTS 9 

by the good increase which God gives to my pen and 
labors I could yield." They contain the ripest and 
wisest conclusions of his rich, active, comprehensive 
mind. In his own day, even, the Essays, to use his 
own words, "of all my other works have been most 
current." The expectation which he expressed (oddly 
enough!) concerning a Latin version of them, is 
likely to be fulfilled by the English version : it was, 
that they "may last as long as books last." 

ABRAHAM COWLEY (1618-1667) 
Chronology 
1618 Born in London, son of, a stationer. Fondness for 
Faerie Queene. Scholar in Westminster School. 
1633 Poeticall Blossoms, five poems, published. 
1637-1643 At Trinity College, Cambridge. Dramatic 
pieces. B. A., 1639; M. A., 1642; ejected, 1643; 
welcomed at Royalist Oxford, St. John's. 

1646 Followed Queen to France. Diplomatic missions. 

1647 T^^ Mistress, favorite love-poems of the period. 
1656 M. D. at Oxford. 

1660 Ode On the Blessed Restoration. Member of the 

newly-founded Royal Society. 
1665 Retired to Chertsey, Queen's lands. 

1667 Died, July 28. Buried near Chaucer and Spenser 

in Westminster Abbey. 

1668 Several Discourses by Way of Essays in Verse and 

Prose. 

The generalizing, impersonal quality which marks 
Bacon's Essays or Counsells as outside the field of 
the English Essay, is not characteristic of Abraham 
Cowley's prose. He uses the term Essays {Several 
Discourses by Way of Essays in Verst and Prose) 



10 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

as Bacon used it ; ^ but his text is the intimate, direct, 
( graceful chatting of an Anglicized Montaigne. And 
\ Cowley, notwithstanding the slender amount of his 

production in this form, should be regarded as the 

real father of the English Essay. 

Like Montaigne's essays, Cowley's were probably 

not directly intended for public circulation. Like 

Montaigne's, they present the fruit of an active and 

varied life. 

Abraham Cowley was the posthumous son of a 
London stationer. The striking feature of his child- 
hood was his sustained fondness for Spenser's Faerie 
Queene. He was educated at Westminster School 
and at Trinity College, Cambridge. His Poeticall 
Blossoms, containing five poems, was published when 
he was only fifteen years old. He did some dramatic 
writing, moreover, in both English and Latin, at Cam- 
bridge, and took there the usual degrees. 

Largely because of his Royalist inclinations he was 
ejected from the University in 1643, ^^^ took refuge 
in more conservative Oxford. In 1646 he joined the 
court of the fugitive Queen in France. From here 
he was sent on various diplomatic missions, one of 
them to England, where, still acting as a Royalist 
agent, he studied medicine at Oxford. Other poetical 
works had appeared at intervals, and the Restoration 
inspired still others, mostly in the form of Odes. 

The opportunity for retirement, which even more 

genuinely than Bacon he seems long to have been 

* The Verse consists of experiments — not of random solilo- 
quies. 



ORIGIN AND EARLY EXPONENTS n 

seeking, came at last. He secured a favorable lease 
of some of the Queen's lands in Chertsey, and went 
there in 1665 to live. At his death in 1667 he was 
thought worthy to lie beside Chaucer and Spenser in 
Westminster Abbey. 

It was while at Chertsey that he wrote most of his 
eleven essays. "The last pieces that we have from his 
hands," says his biographer, Bishop Sprat, "are Dis- 
courses by Way of Essays upon some of the gravest 
subjects that concern the Contentment of a Virtuous 
Mind. These he intended as a real Character of his 
own thoughts, upon the point of his Retirement . . . 
an unfeigned Image of his Soul. ..." He refers 
more than once in them to "Sieur Montague," and it 
is plain that he follows Montaigne in independence 
of thought, in apt discursiveness, and in free use of 
passages from the ancient authors and of items from 
his own experience. He deserves wider recognition. 

[Additional seventeenth-century essayists might be 
considered. One of them, John Dryden, wrote nu- 
merous critical prefaces which quite definitely pre- 
figure certain essays of later authors. These writings 
of Dryden's, however, were invariably subordinate to 
the poetical or dramatic compositions which they ac- 
companied ; and he is allied in neither spirit nor method 
with the other recognized essayists. Though a major 
poet, dramatist, and prose writer, he is a minor essay- 
ist. With other minor essayists of different centuries, 
he will be found included in an alphabetical list at 
the end of the Handbook.] 



II. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS- 
PERIODICAL ESSAYS 

STEELE AND ADDISON 
Chronology 
Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) 
1672 Born, March 12, in Dublin. 
1684 Entered Charterhouse School. 
1689 Entered Christ's Church, Oxford. 
1694 Left college ; enlisted in Horse Guards. 
1700 Made Captain. 1701, The Christian Hero — result 

of a duel. 
1702 The Funeral; other plays. 
1709 The Tatter. Appointed Gazetteer. 
1 71 1 The Spectator. Other periodicals subsequently. 
1713 Entered Parliament. 1714, expelled from that 

body. 
1715 Reentered Parliament and was knighted. 
1718 Death of Lady Steele. 1726, retired to Wales. 
1729 Died at Carmarthen, September i. 

Joseph Addison (1672-1719) 

1672 Born, May i, in Milston. 

1686 Entered Charterhouse. 1687, Entered Queen's Col- 
lege, Oxford. 

1693 M, A. Verses, scholarship. 

1 699- 1 703 Travel and study on the continent. 

1704 The Campaign. Under-secretary of state. 

1709 Contributed from Ireland to The Tatler. 

1711-1714 The Spectator. 1713, Cato. Hostility of 
Alexander Pope. 
12 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 13 

1 71 6 Married Countess of Warwick. 

1717 Secretary of State with Lord Sunderland. 
1719 Political dispute with Steele. Died, June 17. 

THE essay as a type of literature owes little more 
to Montaigne and Cowley than it does to Steele 
and Addison. For these gifted and alert men erected 
the type out of obscurity into popularity, and thereby 
into what seems to be permanence. By presenting 
essays in the new and fortunate medium of periodical 
publications, by persistently bringing home the essay 
to the "business and bosoms" of men, and by giving 
to the form both superficial and pervading attractive- 
ness, Steele and Addison instituted the golden age of 
the essay, so far as popularity is concerned, an age 
which essay-writers since then have dreamed of re- 
viving, not of surpassing. 

The widely known facts concerning the life of each 
writer may be swiftly rehearsed. And as Addison's 
senior by a few weeks, and as the actual originator 
of The Taller and The Spectator, Steele deserves to 
be considered first. An analysis of what the two men 
accomplished in the field of the essay properly suc- 
ceeds the brief account of their lives. 

Richard Steele was born in Dublin, March 12, 1672. 
His father, a well-to-do Dublin attorney, died before 
Richard was five years old, his mother soon after- 
wards. At fourteen he was admitted to Charter- 
house School in London, and here he formed the 
acquaintance and the friendship of Addison. Christ's 



14 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Church, Oxford, which he entered later, he left, with- 
out taking a degree, to become secretary to Lord 
Cutts and a captain in his regiment of the Horse 
Guards. Thackeray in Henry Esmond depicts with 
only slight exaggeration the Steele of this period, his 
chivalry and his good comradeship. The sterner side 
of his character appears in the active dislike for duel- 
ing which he conceived after having dangerously 
wounded his opponent in a conventional duel, and in 
his Christian Hero, which was prompted by this ex- 
perience and was published in 1701. 

The success of this work and of some occasional 
verse previously composed seems to have determined 
him for literature. Three plays, each almost frankly 
reformatory in purpose, he produced in turn. At 
length he received political recognition by being ap- 
pointed Gazetteer, that is, editor of the government 
news organ. His first wife, whom he had married 
in 1703, died in 1706; the next year he married Miss 
Mary Scurlock of Carmarthen, Wales. 

It was in 1709 that he established The Tatler. It 
ran until January 2, 1710-11, when the identity of its 
author had become known. The Spectator followed in 
171 1, and continued until 1713. In both he was as- 
sisted by Addison. Many similar and always short- 
lived literary ventures occupied Steele to the end of 
his active life. He was elected to Parliament in 1713, 
but the next year was convicted of seditious libel and 
expelled. He returned to favor under George I, was 
knighted by him, and again entered Parliament. 

In 1 718 Lady Steele died. A breach with Addi- 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS IS 

son, caused chiefly by political differences, widened as 
the years passed, and remained unhealed at Addison's 
death in 17 19. In 1724 Steele retired from active 
life to his deceased wife's estate at Carmarthen, where 
on September i, 1729, he died. 

Joseph Addison was born May i, 1672, in Milston. 
His father was later the dean of Lichfield Cathedral. 
Addison entered Charterhouse School, London, in 
1686, and the next year went up to Oxford. He re- 
received an M.A. from Magdalen College in 1693. 
From 1698 to 171 1 he held a fellowship. His verses, 
both in Latin and in English, won him great praise 
from Dryden, and one of his compositions brought 
a pension from the government. From 1699 to 1703 
he traveled on the continent. 

His first literary triumph was his poem, The Cam- 
paign, written at the request of the government in 
1704 to celebrate the victory of Marlborough at Blen- 
heim. In order to enlist on the side of the govern- 
ment the talents this poem displayed he was promptly 
made under-secretary of state. His literary reputa- 
tion and skill, together with such controversial writ- 
ings as he found occasion to produce, secured him 
many other remunerative public offices from time to 
time, and a liberal pension upon his retirement. 

Addison was not at his best either as a controver- 
sialist or as a poet. His gentle ingenuity, his wide 
learning, his uprightness, and his quiet humor first 
found adequate expression in The Tatler. Addison 
was stationed in Ireland when this periodical was 



i6 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

established by Steele ; but he recognized it as the work 
of his friend, and contributed to it more and more 
frequently as it progressed. To The Spectator, like- 
wise started by Steele, he contributed even more 
papers than Steele himself.^ He, of course, con- 
tributed to later periodicals also. His Cato, a play 
produced with notable success at Drury Lane Theatre 
in 1 713, was an able dramatic venture; but his poems 
and his miscellaneous prose writings are insignificant 
in comparison with his essays. 

His later life was embittered by two unfortunate 
quarrels. One was precipitated by Alexander Pope, 
who believed Addison guilty of conspiring to under- 
rate his Iliad. Some of the bitterest lines in Pope's 
bitter Epistle to Dr. Arhiithnot were directed at Ad- 
dison. 

The other break was with Steele. This was largely 
owing to political differences which Steele took no 
pains to minimize or repair. It seems to have been 
partly due to unfriendly rigor shown by Addison in 
collecting from Steele a loan of one thousand pounds. 
Addison died unreconciled. The calumny heaped upon 
him in these quarrels is in strong contrast to the praise 
expressed by the great body of his contemporaries. 

In 1 718 Addison retired on a pension. The next 
year, June 17, 17 19, he died, and was buried in West- 
minster Abbey. 

The Tatler, in which the essays of these men first 
appeared, was by no means the first of English period- 
^Out of 555 papers, Steele wrote 236, Addison 274. 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS i? 

icals. Various ones had appeared and had been dis- 
continued ; and Daniel Defoe's Review, first published 
in 1704, was still being issued. Two things Steele 
seems to have learned directly from Defoe: the disad- 
vantages of presenting merely news and political con- 
troversy, and the attractiveness inherent in questions 
of prevailing manners and morals. As the Review 
had reported the bald discussions of a certain "Scan- 
dalous Club," so in a kindlier, a more constructive 
spirit The Tatler presented, in letter form, the obser- 
vations and cogitations of "an old man, a philosopher, 
a humorist, an astrologer, and a censor," who called 
himself Isaac Bickerstaff. The flexibility of the 
scheme is indicated by this statement in Number i : 

"All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, 
shall be under the article of White's Chocolate House ; po- 
etry, under that of Will's Coffee-house; learning-, under the 
title of Grecian; foreign and domestic news, you will have 
from St. James's Coffee-house; and what else I have to 
offer on any subject shall be dated from my own apart- 
ment." 

The nom de plume, Isaac Bickerstaflf, was a well- 
chosen one for the prompt popularity of Steele's novel 
periodical. It was in the character of an astrologer 
by that name that Jonathan Swift had published in 
1708 his Predictions for the Year iyo8, a piercing 
satire on prognosticating almanac makers, particu- 
larly on one notorious hoax named John Partridge. 
It is worth while to add further details concerning 
this matter. 



i8 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

The very first of the "predictions" indulged in by 
Swift as Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., was that Partridge 
"will infallibly die upon the 29th of March next, about 
eleven at night, of a raging fever." Swift followed 
up the original prediction with an account, in an 
anonymous Letter to a Person of Honor, of the death 
of Partridge at "five minutes after seven, by which 
it is clear that Mr. Bickerstafif was mistaken almost 
four hours in his calculations." A Vindication of 
Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., also appeared, "proving" the 
said Partridge to be dead. Meanwhile Partridge had 
loudly protested the imposture of Bickerstaff, and 
the reality of his own continued fleshly existence. 

The Tatler was thus launched upon a town con- 
vulsed with laughter and ready to devour anything 
bearing the name of the fictitious astrologer, "By 
this good fortune," as Steele wrote in the Dedication 
of the first volume of collected papers, "the name of 
Isaac Bickerstaff gained an audience of all who had 
any taste of wit" ; and the initial success of the ven- 
ture was assured. 

The Tatler retained the attention of its audience. 
It circulated even to Ireland, where Addison recog- 
nized it as the work of Steele. Contributions from 
Addison, as well as from Dryden, Swift, and others, 
helped to maintain its popularity. And though the 
earlier of the two great essay-periodicals, it contains 
many of the best essays of each of the principal 
authors. 

The Tatler was discontinued, however, with the 
271st number. The reason for discontinuing it is 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 19 

conveyed by what Steele over his own name wrote 
in this final issue : 

"This work indeed has for some time been disagreeable 
to me, and the purpose of it wholly lost by my being so long 
understood as the author. ... I shall not carry my humility 
so far as to call myself a vicious man, but at the same time 
must confess my life is at best but pardonable. And with no 
greater character than this a man would make at best but 
an indifferent progress in attacking prevailing and fashion- 
able vices, which Mr. Bickerstaff has done with a freedom 
of spirit, that would have lost both its beauty and efficacy 
had it been pretended to by Mr. Steele." 

In this final issue, and again in the preface to an 
edition of the papers in book form, Steele assigned to 
Addison the most generous credit for his assistance 
in the enterprise. And two months later, on March 
I, 171 1, the two friends issued the first number of 
The Spectator. 

Many circumstances contributed to make The Spec- 
tator more widely read than The Tatler. Of course, 
it appealed directly to The Tatler audience at once, 
their appetites whetted, not appeased. The habit of 
reading, the expectation of finding pleasure in such 
reading, had spread. Then the Spectator, by declar- 
ing in his first paper his resolve "to observe an exact 
neutrality between the Whigs and Tories," placed his 
paper finally above the strife of parties. Further- 
more, it appeared daily instead of thrice a week. And 
instead of having communications dated from differ- 
ent places, the Spectator served as the mouthpiece of 
"The Club," a group of seven in all, representing 



20 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

virtually all classes of English reading society. The 
whole machinery of communications, of personal 
idiosyncrasies, of supposed places and times, avail- 
able in The Tatler, was thus in The Spectator ren- 
dered sevenfold more flexible and responsive. Then, 
too, knowledge of its real authorship was less likely 
to turn the edge of its criticisms. Above all, the 
sustained wit, kindliness, and aptness of its papers 
served to extend its circulation and increase its effec- 
tiveness. It sold in what then seemed stupendous 
quantities, and its circulation even withstood a 
doubling of the price, made necessary by an increase 
in the tax on paper. 

A work on such a basis naturally, however, could 
not continue indefinitely. The verisimilitude which 
gave it such charm made successive changes in The 
Club inevitable. Sir Roger could not live on for 
many years, nor Will Honeycomb continue single, 
nor the Templar be always an idler. The Club thus 
gradually dissolved, and holding out in Number 550 
some hope of a reorganization, the series came to an 
end with Number 555, signed by Richard Steele, on 
December 6, 1712. The promoters promptly occu- 
pied themselves with The Guardian. But on June 18, 
1 714, The Spectator was revived by a Spectator now 
loquacious, instead of taciturn as before, and was 
continued for eighty numbers, one volume more, the 
only advertised reason being that the earlier series 
comprised an "odd number" of volumes! 

Imitations had already sprung up thickly in Lon- 
don. Soon they were appearing in Scotland, in the 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 21 

American Colonies, and in almost every country in 
Europe. By 1750 no less than 106 different English 
periodicals similar to The Tatler and The Spectator 
had appeared. By 1809, that is, within the space of 
one hundred years, the total had increased to 221. 

There are, to be sure, few precise counterparts of 
these essay-periodicals among our current magazines; 
but various sections (Oldest Inhabitant, Easy Chair, 
Observer, Spectator, etc.) and frequent independent 
essays in our modern periodical publications daily 
proclaim how numerous and how interesting a progeny 
Defoe's Scandalous Club, Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., and 
The Spectator have begotten. 

Thus by publishing essays in periodicals, Steele and 
Addison contributed immeasurably to the firm estab- 
lishment of both essays and periodicals in English 
literature. The genius of each of these men deserves 
full recognition for the vogue given by them to the 
essay in The Tatler and The Spectator. 

Yet the writings of these two men were widely read 
not only because they were brief and frequent, but 
because they were also apt and interesting. In a 
more literal sense than any that preceded them they 
dealt with things humanly important. They forsook 
the attitude, assumed by Montaigne's Essais, of being 
entirely of personal significance. They forsook the 
lofty, philosophizing attitude of Bacon, as also the 
timid, groping attitude of Cowley. The purpose of 
each periodical was reformatory. Steele stated it to 
be the general purpose of The Tatler "to expose the 



22 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

false arts of life, to pull off the disguises of cunning, 
vanity, and affectation, and to recommend a general 
simplicity in our dress, our discourse, and our be- 
havior" ; ^ and again : "to recommend truth, innocence, 
honor, and virtue, as the chief ornaments of life." ^ 
The Spectator was no less definite. Writing with the 
hand of Addison he hopes that he may "contribute to 
the diversion or improvement of the country," ^ and 
mentions his opportunity for "reprehending those 
vices which are too trivial for the chastisement of the 
law, and too fantastical for the cognizance of the 
pulpit." * The vices of political chicanery and par- 
tisanship, gambling and dueling, vanity and prudish- 
ness, hollow gallantry in place of courtesy, ignorance 
and pedantry — these were among the things against 
which the authors of The Tatler and The Spectator 
set their faces and plied their ready pens. 

And there is abundant testimony of their success. 
The poet, John Gay, their contemporary,^ in his Pres- 
ent State of Wit (May, 171 1), said: 

"To give you my own thoughts of this gentleman's [The 
Tatter's] writings, I shall in the first place observe, that there 
is this noble difference between him and all the rest of our 
polite and gallant authors: the latter have endeavored to 
please the age by falling in with them, and encouraging them 
in their fashionable vices, and false notions of things. It 
would have been a jest some time since, for a man to have 

* Dedicatory Epistle to first volume. 

* See No. 271. 
'Number i. 

* Number 34. 

"Author of Trivia, in praise of city life, and of The Beggars' 
Opera. 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 23 

asserted that anything witty could be said in praise of a 
married state; or that devotion and virtue were any neces- 
sary to the character of a fine gentleman. Bickerstaff ven- 
tured to tell the town that they were a parcel of fops, fools, 
and vain coquettes; but in such a manner, as even pleased 
them, and made them more than half inclined to believe that 
he spoke truth. 

"Instead of complying with the false sentiments or vicious 
tastes of the age, either in morality, criticism, or good breed- 
ing; he has boldly assured them that they were altogether 
in the wrong, and commanded them, with an authority which 
perfectly well became him, to surrender themselves to his 
arguments for virtue and good sense, 

"It is incredible to conceive the effect his writings have 
had on the town; how many thousand follies they have 
either quite vanished, or given a very great check to: how 
much countenance they have added to virtue and religion; 
how many people they have rendered happy, by showing 
them it was their own fault if they were not so; and lastly, 
how entirely they have convinced our fops and young fel- 
lows of the value and advantages of learning. 

"He has indeed rescued it out of the hands of pedants 
and fools, and discovered the true method of making it ami- 
able and lovely to all mankind. In the dress he gives it, it 
is the most welcome guest at tea tables and assemblies, and 
is relished and caressed by the merchants on the Change; 
accordingly, there is not a lady at court, nor a banker in 
Lombard Street, who is not verily persuaded, that Captain 
Steele is the greatest scholar and best casuist of any man 
in England. 

"Lastly, his writings have set all our wits and men of let- 
ters upon a new way of thinking, of which they had little 
or no notion before ; and though we cannot yet say that any 
of them have come up to the beauties of the original, I 
think we may venture to affirm, that every one of them 



24 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

writes and thinks much more justly than they did some time 
since." 

And Dr. Johnson, in his Life of Addison, testifies: 

"The Tatler and Spectator . . . were published at a time 
when two parties, loud, restless, and violent, each with 
plausible declarations, and each perhaps without any dis- 
tinct termination of its views, were agitating the nation; to 
minds heated with political contest, they supplied cooler and 
more inoffensive reflections; and it is said by Addison, in a 
subsequent work, that they had a perceptible influence upon 
the conversation of that time, and taught the frolic and the 
gay to unite merriment with decency." 

The method and the purpose of these essays have 
alike proved native to the essay form. Addison and 
Steele to an extent barely conceived by Bacon brought 
the essay home to the "business and bosoms of men." 
And few worthy essays since their day have lacked 
the purpose of leading men pleasantly into saner 
thinking, more wholesome living. 

The most striking contribution of Steele and Addi- 
son to the essay, however, was the lasting attractive- 
ness which they gave it. The egotism which in self- 
painting by lesser men than Montaigne would have 
been repellent, is deftly made by Steele and Addison 
at once fictitious and amiable. Not even the very 
definite and usually very obvious lesson or moral at- 
tached to each essay could spoil the pleasing effect 
of the buoyant wit, fancy, and good sense which the 
essay contained. In form as well it was epoch- 
making. In these essays prose became, as never be- 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 25 

fore, a ready and obedient instrument with a charm 
distinctly its own. 

But these points the reader may and should develop 
from the essays themselves, from the actual writings 
of these two inventors and masterful exponents of 
the periodical, the modern essay. 

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784) 

Chronology 
1709 Born, September 18, at Lichfield, son of a book- 
seller. Precocity. Infirmities, indolence. 
1728 Entered Pembroke College, Oxford. Translations. 
1735 Kept school at Lichfield. Garrick a pupil. 

1737 Went with Garrick to London. Hack-writing. 

Grub Street. 

1738 London, imitation of a Juvenal satire. 
1744 Life of Savage. 

1747-1755 Dictionary. Lord Chesterfield incident. 

1749 Vanity of Human Wishes, poem. Irene, tragedy. 

1750-1752 The Rambler. 1753-4, Adventurer. 1758-1760, 
Idler papers. Household and friends — Miss 
Williams, Francis Barbour, the Thrales. 

1755 M.A. from Oxford. 

1762 Pension of three hundred pounds. 

1763 Boswell met Johnson. The Club organized. 
1765 LL.D. from Dublin. Edition of Shakespeare. 
1775 LL.D. from Oxford. Tour of the Hebrides. Con- 
versation. Melancholy. Illnesses. 

1784 Died, December 13. Buried in Westminster Ab- 
bey. 
1 791 Life of Johnson, by James Boswell. 

The subject of Dr. Johnson is a large one. It must 
be treated here within the narrow limits imposed by 



26 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

considering him as an essayist. As such he is note- 
worthy, not epoch-making. 

The simple facts of his life are these: He was bom 
September i8, 1709, the son of a bookseller in Lich- 
field. Poverty pursued him well into his middle life, 
and melancholy and indolence always beset him. His 
repulsive appearance and manners, moreover, tended 
to keep people away from him. But his extraordinary 
knowledge and wisdom and his skill as a talker at- 
tracted to his circle the finest spirits of his day. 

Johnson attended Pembroke College for a time 
and later succeeded poorly as a teacher at Lichfield. 
With David Garrick, one of his pupils, he went to 
London in 1737 and found a residence and some hack- 
writing in Grub Street. His talents and his produc- 
tions attracted such attention from the booksellers that 
ten years later (1747) he was entrusted with the task 
of compiling a comprehensive English dictionary, a 
task which despite his indolence he completed in the 
incredibly short time of eight years. It was in corv- 
nection with this work that he wrote his famous letter 
to Lord Chesterfield, the great gentleman and literary 
patron of the day, spurning a tardy offer of assistance. 

Meanwhile Johnson attempted periodical essays 
after the manner of The Spectator. The Rambler, 
208 numbers entirely from his own pen, his numerous 
papers in Hawkesworth's Adventurer, and a series 
of papers in Newbery's The Universal Chronicle 
under the title of The Idler, all appeared between 1750 
and 1760, and together firmly established Johnson's 
reputation as a critic and a moralist. 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 27 

His Rasselas, a romance, was composed in the 
evenings of one week as a means of defraying the 
expenses of his mother's funeral. At last, in 1762, a 
government pension placed him in easy circumstances 
for life. The Club which he established the next 
year, with Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, and Goldsmith 
among its original nine members, is as famous in the 
history of real life as the Spectator Club in the realm 
of fiction. 

Indolence and increasing melancholy combined to 
check his literary labors. He did live for Boswell, 
however, during these latter years, and furnished this 
matchless biographer with material for his great work. 
On December 13, 1784, Johnson died; he, like Addi- 
son, was buried in Westminster Abbey. 

What of the significance of Dr. Johnson as an 
essayist? Two objects, both frankly proclaimed by 
Johnson in the final issue of The Rambler, each pur- 
sued with equal consistency in his other essays, he 
may be credited with attaining. The earlier essayists 
by their use of English prose as a literary medium 
had caused surprise ; Johnson helped greatly to give 
final dignity to the form ; he removed cause for sur- 
prise, and established English prose to such an extent 
that his century is almost barren of other forms. 
Furthermore, whereas Steele and Addison had made 
wisdom and virtue respectable, Johnson helped to 
make them the only respectable things to pursue. 

Each of these contributions to the development of 
the essay deserves further consideration. 



28 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

"I have labored," wrote Johnson, "to refine our language 
to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial bar- 
barisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations. Some- 
thing, perhaps, I have added to the elegance of its construc- 
tion and something to the harmony of its cadence. When 
common v^^ords were less pleasing to the ear, or less dis- 
tinct in their signification, I have familiarized the terms of 
philosophy by applying them to popular ideas, but have rarely 
admitted any word not authorized by former writers; for 
I believe that whoever knows the English tongue in its pres- 
ent extent will be able to express his thoughts without 
further help from other nations." 

It was with the authority of the scholarly compiler 
of a great English dictionary that he wrote. 

This confidence in the sufficiency of English, par- 
ticularly of English prose, was far from universal. 
Although no writer since Bacon had consistently pro- 
duced works in Latin as the "universal language," 
many of the greater writers since Milton had been 
skeptical of English as a lasting medium and had 
recommended means of forestalling its degeneration 
and decay. Johnson's confidence in English, it is 
true, depended partly on the attempted infusion of 
Latinism which his countrymen never fully accepted.^ 
Johnson, too, it must be said, wavered in his con- 
fidence when at Goldsmith's death in 1774 he wrote 
Goldsmith's Westminster Abbey epitaph in Latin; but 
it is significant that virtually all of Johnson's friends 
protested against this disregard of the claims of Eng- 
lish. Dr. Johnson once for all established the dignity 

* Yet fictitious characters which in the earlier essays were 
given Latin pames, were in his later essays given English ones. 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 29 

of the English prose essay. And whereas Steele and 
Addison had employed the essay form fortuitously, 
able writers since Johnson have trained themselves as 
deliberately for essay-writing as for dramatic or po- 
etical composition. 

The other object avowed by Dr. Johnson is thus 
expressed in the final issue of The Rambler: 

"I have seldom descended to the arts by which favor is 
obtained. I have seen the meteors of fashion rise and fall, 
w^ithout any attempt to add a moment to their duration. I 
have never complied w^ith temporary curiosity, nor enabled 
my readers to discuss the topic of the day; I have rarely 
exemplified my assertions by living characters ; in my papers 
no man could look for censures of his enemies or praises of 
himself; and they only are expected to peruse them, whose 
passions left them leisure for abstracted truth, and whom 
virtue could please by its naked dignity. ... I shall never 
envy the honors which wit and learning obtain in any other 
cause, if I can be numbered among the writers who have 
given ardor to virtue, and confidence to truth." 

Such boldness and integrity would have awakened 
only laughter at the beginning of the century. It is 
not too fantastic, perhaps, to trace the influence of 
Johnson's stand during the latter eighteenth century 
in the increasing genuineness and justness of literary 
criticism, in the growing dissatisfaction with corrupt 
politics, in the ever greater regard for the simple, the 
homely, the pure. Without some such change the 
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard would hardly 
have attracted readers of Gay's Trivia, She Stoops to 
Conquer the spectators of The Beggars' Opera, or 
The Vicar of Wakefield those who had fed upon 



30 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Pamela and Tom Jones. The Man in Black would 
without this change have appeared dull beside Sir 
Roger, and Beau Tibbs pallid indeed beside Will 
Honeycomb. 

All the more because Johnson is not widely read, 
is not easy for most people to read, it should be recog- 
nized that of the qualities possessed by the great essay- 
treasures of the nineteenth century, two are in great 
measure contributed by him : the dignity and suffi- 
ciency of the English prose essay as a type, and the 
pervading and uniform exaltation of intellect and of 
soul. 

OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-1774) 
Chronology 
1728 Born, November 10, son of poor rector, Kilkenny 
West, Ireland. Thomas Byrne. Verses. Small- 
pox. 
1744 Entered Trinity College, Dublin. B.A., 1749. Es- 
capades. 

1752 Edinburgh University, medicine. 

1753 To Continent, Leyden University, travels. 

1756 Returned to London. Physician, usher, hack- 
writer. 

1759 Enquiry into Present State of Polite Learning in 

Europe. 

1760 Chinese Letters in Public Ledger; 1762, Citizen 

of the World. Dr. Johnson. The Club. 

1764 The Traveller, 1766, Vicar of Wakefield. 17^7, 
Good-Natured Man, a comedy. 1770, Deserted 
Village. 1772,, She Stoops to Conquer. 

177^ Retaliation — mock epitaphs. Worry over indebted- 
ness. Died, April 4. Latin epitaph in West- 
minster Abbey. 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 31 

The many autobiographical passages in Goldsmith's 
works, together with Washington Irving's Life of 
Goldsmith, have made him almost as real a character 
as Dr. Johnson. Like Steele, Addison, and Dr. John- 
son, he figures in nineteenth century historical fiction. 
Notwithstanding his insignificant form and homely 
features, and his impecunious, dallying, rather con- 
ceited nature, his hastily constructed writings steadily 
attract genuine interest and uniform praise. Many of 
the facts concerning him should be freshly in mind for 
the reader of his essays. 

His father was a poor rector in central Ireland. 
There, one of a numerous family, Oliver Goldsmith 
was born, November 10, 1728. The character of his 
father is portrayed both in The Man in Black and in 
the Vicar of Wakefield. His surroundings in early 
life are reflected in The Deserted Village. Under 
a schoolmaster named Thomas or Paddy Byrne, he 
indulged and developed his natural taste for tales and 
verses. It was in childhood that he was disfigured 
by smallpox. His school days in various towns and 
his college days in Dublin were constantly enlivened 
by escapades resulting now from his generosity, now 
from his indolence or gullibility. He once mistook 
a private house for an inn, after the fashion described 
in She Stoops to Conquer. He composed ballads and 
had them sung in the streets in order to get money. 
Trinity College, now so proud of him as her son, was 
compelled by the vicissitudes of fate to discipline him 
more than once. 

Receiving his A.B. in 1749, he spent three years in 



Z2 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

idleness and uncertainty as to his choice of a pro- 
fession. The tavern scene in She Stoops to Conquer 
doubtless reproduces some of his experiences during 
this period. At length he went to Edinburgh, in 
1752, resolved to study medicine. The next year he 
managed to secure funds for prosecuting his studies 
on the Continent. He remained but a short time, 
however, at the University of Leyden before setting 
out on foot upon a tour of Europe. His experiences 
on this journey were utilized not only in his poem, 
The Traveller, but also in George Primrose's account 
of his adventures in The Vicar of Wakefield. 

In 1756, penniless and unknown, he arrived in 
London. In turn he tried, both in vain, the profes- 
sion of physician and the occupation of usher, or 
under-teacher, in a school. Finally he found em- 
ployment as a hack-writer with Griffiths, the grasp- 
ing publisher of the Monthly Review, and was in- 
auspiciously launched upon his career. 

An independent work published in 1759, and the 
appearance the next year in the Public Ledger of his 
Chinese Letters, brought him a somewhat larger in- 
come and the attention of literary men. He came to 
know Dr. Johnson, and was one of the original mem- 
bers of the famous Club. 

A succession of productions, each dearly cherished 
to-day, and each quite popular in his day, appeared 
during the next fourteen years. During the same 
time he compiled numerous and remunerative works 
for the booksellers. He had many friends. But he 
spent more rapidly than he earned. And when the 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 33 

struggle and worry made him ill, he — whom others 
had all along refused to patronize as a physician — 
insisted upon dosing himself. He died, April 4, 1774, 
at the age of only forty-six. 

His indebtedness proved to be so disgracefully large 
that a proposal to bury him in Westminster Abbey 
had to be abandoned. An inscription, written (not- 
withstanding the protests of Burke, Reynolds, and 
others) in Latin, by Dr. Johnson, was nevertheless set 
up in the Abbey. It contains the pregnant phrase: 

"Nullum tetigit quod non ornavit." 
"He touched nothing which he did not adorn," 

Goldsmith's Chinese Letters were reprinted as The 
Citizen of the World. This work consists of one 
hundred and twenty-three letters, ostensibly from an 
educated "Chinese" or Chinaman sojourning in Eng- 
land. They are essays as distinctly as Steele's Tatler 
papers. The fiction in them is rather inconsistently 
maintained, but the point of view is highly illuminat- 
ing. The Chinese visits many of the places which 
Bickerstaff, the Spectator, the Rambler, and others had 
in turn visited. And from every place and incident 
he derives entertainment and profit. In humor and 
kindliness, and for the most part in realism, his letters 
surpass the lucubrations and meditations of them all. 

Other essays of Goldsmith's are contained in The 
Bee, a periodical issued from October 6, 1759, to 
November 24, 1759. These papers are as varied in 
subject-matter and in treatment as those of The Spec- 
tator and The Rambler. 



34 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Goldsmith was not above all an essayist. He and 
his contemporaries alike doubtless regarded his essays 
as inferior in worth to his poems, his comedies, and 
his novel. He is an essayist, however, who may well 
be placed at the head of those who set out merely to 
follow in the footsteps of Addison and Steele. And 
as Dr. Johnson contributed to the development of 
the type by giving it breadth and sturdiness, so Gold- 
smith, as his essay-writings will show to the reader, 
helped to perfect and establish the essay by giving it 
complementary qualities of grace, intimacy and hu- 
manness. 

The things which Steele and Addison, Johnson, and 
Goldsmith as essayists did well were done either as well 
or quite indifferently by numerous other writers of 
the century. (See alphabetical list in Appendix.) 
These writers added little, however, to the essay forms 
and traditions. The essay heritage left by the eight- 
eenth century was essentially that contributed by 
Montaigne, Bacon and Cowley, and by the four great 
writers of the periodical essays: Steele and Addison, 
Johnson, and Goldsmith. These men prepared the 
way for the production and circulation of essays, un- 
exampled in number and variety, among the ever- 
increasing reading public of the nineteenth century. 



III. NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS- 
ENGLISH AND AMERICAN 

CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834) 
Chronology 
1775 Born, February 10, in Crown Office Row, The 

Temple, London. 
1782-1789 Attended Christ's Hospital, charity school. 
1792 Appointed clerk in South Sea House; 1795, in 

East India Co. 
1796 Sister, Mary, in fit of insanity, killed mother. 

Lamb published four sonnets in book of verse 

mostly by Coleridge. 
1796-1820 Published at intervals verse, tales, dramas, 

and criticisms; collected Works issued, 1818. 
1 820- 1 823 Elia Essays in London Magazine; in book 

form, 1823. 
1825 Retired from clerkship on pension. 

1833 Last Essays of Elia, book form. 

1834 Death. 

(1847 Death of Mary.) 

DURING the first thirty years of the nineteenth 
century an inhabitant of the section of London 
known as Islington might many times have seen 
walking toward a certain institution well known in the 
neighborhood, two persons, a man and a woman, neatly 
and simply clothed in black, both weeping bitterly; 
with one arm the man supported the woman, and 

35 



36 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

under the other arm he carried a strait- jacket. It was 
Mary Lamb, conscious of an approaching attack of 
insanity, being conducted to the madhouse by her 
brother Charles. On the 22nd of September, 1796, 
in the first of her paroxysms, Charles had been un- 
able to wrest a knife from Mary's hand before she 
had murdered their mother. He had subsequently 
secured her release from custody by promising the 
civil authorities to watch over her; and another time 
had now come when she must be placed under re- 
straint. 

This somewhat lurid picture needs early mention 
because it brings into proper relief the charm, the 
pathos, and the heroism of Lamb's writings. Mary 
Lamb's recurring illness, too, was not the only en- 
couragement to misanthropy which in 1800, at the 
age of twenty-five, Charles Lamb had to withstand. 
He was under-sized. He was afflicted with a morti- 
fying stutter. The impecuniousness of his father, a 
humble clerk to a lawyer in the Inner Temple, had 
compelled Charles to leave the Blue Coat (charity) 
School which he had been attending and to accept a 
position in the South Sea House, later a similar one 
with the East India Company, where he earned a 
small salary as a copyist clerk. He had met Ann 
Simons near his grandmother's home in the country 
and had loved her; it was more than a passing fancy, 
for when she had not reciprocated and had become 
Mrs. Bartram instead, he had had to be confined for 
a short time in an asylum himself. He had a selfish 
brother who refused to shoulder any of the respon- 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 37 

sibilities of the family. Death had recently robbed 
the family of other cherished members in addition 
to the murdered mother. When his friend Lloyd 
had tried to cheer Lamb by keeping him away from 
Mary's side, Lamb had abruptly broken with Lloyd. 
His only real friend, the companion of his school 
days, the poet Coleridge, was a long journey from 
London. 

One night in the loneliness of his lodgings, as he 
awaited the temporary oblivion of the next day's 
drudgery, he put out of sight the sonnets and the 
blank verse with which he had been toying, and wrote : 

"Where are they gone, the old familiar faces? 
I had a mother, but she died, and left me, 
Died prematurely in a day of horrors — 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 

"I have had playmates, I have had companions. 
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days — 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 

"I have been laughing, I have been carousing. 
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies — 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 

"I loved a love once, fairest among women. 
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her — 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 

"I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man. 
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly ; 
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces. 

"Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood. 
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse. 
Seeking to find the old familiar faces. 



38 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

"Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother ! 
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling? 
So might we talk of the old familiar faces. 

"For some they have died, and some they have left me, 
And some they have taken from me; all are departed; 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." 

And yet the Lamb of this broken-hearted lamenta- 
tion is not the Lamb of English literature. Misan- 
thropy, morbidity, tragedy, pathos even — despite the 
encouragement to each which his life furnished — are 
not the qualities for which men turn and turn again 
to the Essays of Elia, the Letters, and the other works 
of Charles Lamb. The mood which expressed itself 
in a sad lament was a rare one with him. What, in 
1800, during the hours when he is not transcribing 
items about muslin, cutlery, and calico, is he ordinarily 
doing? Well, he is smoking, for one thing; like most 
Englishmen of his time, he is also drinking — some- 
thing hot and probably rather strong; he is reading 
voraciously and lovingly all the books which he can 
afford to buy containing seventeenth century prose, 
poetry, and drama; and (perhaps as a means of sup- 
plying tobacco, toddy, and books) he is writing jokes 
for the newspapers! 

A few samples of the labored facetiousness with 
which in 1802 young Lamb held at bay the dogs of 
loneliness and sorrow will not be out of place. As 
Elia in his Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago, he 
explains that every morning paper kept an author to 
provide daily certain witty paragraphs at sixpence a 
joke, and that he was accustomed to rise early each 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 39 

morning throughout the year, "the only time we 
could spare for this manufactory of jokes — our sup- 
plementary livelihood, that supplied us in every want 
beyond mere bread and cheese." 

Referring to a fashion then current of wearing 
pink hose, he quotes fondly in this same essay one 
of his paragraphs in which 

"allusively to the flight of Astrea — ultima coelestium terras 
reliquit—we pronounced . . . that MODESTY, TAKING 
HER FINAL LEAVE OF MORTALS, HER LAST 
BLUSH WAS VISIBLE IN HER ASCENT TO THE 
HEAVENS BY THE TRACT OF HER GLOWING IN- 
STEP." 

Mr. E. V. Lucas, Lamb's modern biographer, has dis- 
covered further paragraphs as follows : 

"The roseate tint, so agreeably diffused through the silk 
stockings of our females, induces the belief that the dye is 
cast for their lovers." 

"The decline of red stockings is as fatal to the wits, as 
the going out of fashion to an overstocked jeweller; some 
of these gentry have literally for some months past fed on 
roses." 

"Mr. Monk Lewis was so much hurt by his fall, that, we 
are told, he continued for some minutes senseless. Very 
probable." 

"We find in the weekly account of clerical promotions 
that the Rev. Mr. Sheepshanks succeeds Dr. Mereweather in 
the Rectory of Bleating." 

"A bench of Justices certainly gives us an idea of some- 
thing wooden. Shakespeare, in his seven ages, represents 
a Justice as made up with saws, etc." 

"The poets have always been lovers of good liquor from 



40 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Anacreon and Ben Jonson downwards; hence they are some- 
times termed in derision dram-atists." 

"Half a dozen jests a day," says Elia further in 
the Newspapers essay, "why, it seems nothing! We 
make twice the number every day in our lives as a 
matter of course." Lamb did, at any rate. In the 
gatherings of literary people, players, wits, and eccen- 
tric individuals at the Lambs' — including Coleridge, 
De Quincey, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Hunt, and once 
even Carlyle — Lamb was known chiefly as a maker of 
small jokes and puns. De Quincey thus describes his 
method : 

"Lamb said little except when an opening arose for a pun. 
And how effectual that sort of small shot was from him 
I need not say to anybody who remembers his infirmity of 
stammering, and his dexterous management of it for pur- 
poses of light and shade. He was often able to train the 
roll of stammers into settling upon the words immediately 
preceding the effective one; by which means the keynote of 
the jest or sarcasm, benefiting by the sudden liberation of 
his embargoed voice, was delivered with the force of a pistol 
shot. That stammer was worth an annuity to him as an 
ally of his wit. Firing under cover of that advantage, he 
did triple execution; for, in the first place, the distressing 
sympathy of the hearers with his distress of utterance won 
for him the silence of deep attention; and then, whilst he 
had us all hoaxed into this attitude of mute suspense by an 
appearance of distress that he perhaps did not really feel, 
down came the plunging shot into the very thick of us, with 
ten times the effect it would else have had." 

"M-martin," he once blurted out to his friend Bur- 
ney at the whist table, "if d-dirt were trumps, wh-what 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 41 

a h-h-hand you would hold." In introducing his 
sister to Hood, he obviously desired to turn aside any 
effusion of compliments: "My sister Mary," he said. 
"Allow me to introduce my sister Mary; she is a 
very good woman, but she d-d-drinks !" After Words- 
worth had been expressing some rather pompous, non- 
adulatory criticism of Shakespeare, Lamb burst in 
with: "Here's Wordsworth, he says he could have 
written Hamlet himself, if he only had the m-m-mind !" 
When reference was made to the fact that he often 
went late to his work at the South Sea House, Lamb 
replied: "True; but I always make up for it by 
going home early." "Charles, did you ever hear me 
preach?" Coleridge once said to him. "I never heard 
you do anything else," Lamb answered. In recount- 
ing amidst his trials the many blessings which he en- 
joyed he declared that "The wind is tempered to the 
shorn Lambs." His landlord, so he said, had retired 
on forty pounds a year and one anecdote. 

On a certain occasion when he had dined with his 
physician, he had been carried home by a servant. 
Next morning he wrote: 

"My sister has begged me to write an apology to Mrs. A. 
and you for disgracing your party. Now, it does seem to 
me that I had rather honored your party, for every one that 
was not drunk (and one or two of the ladies, I am sure, 
were not) must have been set off greatly in contrast to me. 
I was the scapegoat. The soberer they seemed. . . . But 
still you will say (or the men and maids at your house will 
say) that it is not a seemly sight for an old gentleman to 
go home pick-a-back. Well, maybe it is not. But I never 
studied grace. I take it to be a merely superficial accom- 



42 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

plishment. I regard more the internal acquisitions. The 
great object after supper is to get home, and whether that 
is obtained in a horizontal posture or perpendicular (as 
foolish men and apes affect for dignity) I think is little to 
the purpose. . . . Here I am, able to compose a sensible, ra- 
tional apology, and what signifies how I got here?" 

"Insuperable proclivity to gin in poor old Lamb. 
His talk contemptibly small, indicating wondrous ig- 
norance and shallowness, even when it was serious and 
good-mannered, which it seldom was," with only "a 
most slender fiber of actual worth ... in that poor 
Charles ... in his better times and moods." This 
was what gigantic, serious, thundering Carlyle thought 
of Lamb — "a nondescript and harmlessly useless" sort 
of genius. Hazlitt, who knew Lamb better and whose 
world-spectacles were in general more carefully 
polished, imputed Lamb's puns and light talk to his 
humility and his desire to be agreeable : "Lamb often 
had wiser things to say than he would utter, but, fear- 
ing perhaps that he might go beyond the apprehension 
of certain of the company and make them uncom- 
fortable, he preferred to maintain a lower and friend- 
lier level by indulging in nonsense." Doubtless it was 
as Professor Winchester says: "Just because life was 
to him so serious a matter, he took delight in up- 
setting those people who are always mistaking stupid- 
ity for seriousness and dulness for dignity." ^ 

Such in brief was the life, and such the spirit of 
Charles Lamb: to those who did not or could not 

* C. T. Winchester : A Group of English Essayists, New 
York, 1910. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 43 

know him, something of a buffoon, something even of 
an imbecile; to those, on the other hand, who knew 
him well, in a high and difficult sense heroic. The 
most intimate revelations of his life, written in its 
ripest period, are what one reads in the Essays of Elia. 
Before opening a copy of them, fix vividly in mind a 
picture of the author. Think of him proceeding daily 
to his high stool and his pen, those certain providers 
of bread and cheese, at the South Sea House or the 
East India Company's offices; think of him returning 
at night to his simple home and his loving sister to 
enjoy a smoky, bibulous, jolly evening with his friends. 
Think of him contriving from time to time to compose 
an Elia essay — now an extended pun like April Fools' 
Day, now an effusion like the Roast Pig dissertation. 
Think of him in franker moments writing such a 
heart-piercing reverie as Dream-Children, where he 
describes how his little ones, little Alice and sturdy 
John, had crept about him one evening to hear stories 
about their elders, and how, after telling them of their 
grandmother and of his own boyhood, he had con- 
tinued : 

"Then I told them how for seven long years, in hope some- 
times, sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the 
fair Alice W n; and, as much as children could under- 
stand, I explained to them what coyness, and difficulty, and 
denial meant in maidens — when suddenly, turning to Alice, 
the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such 
a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of 
them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was; 
and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew 
fainter to my view, receding, and still receding till nothing 



44 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

at last but two mournful features were seen in the utter- 
most distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed 
upon me the effects of speech: 'We are not of Alice, nor 
of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice 
called Bartrum father. We are nothing, less than nothing, 
and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must 
wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages be- 
fore we have existence, and a name' — and immediately 
awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm- 
chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget 
unchanged by my side. . . ." 

Think also of Lamb saving, in excess of what to- 
bacco and gin and frequent entertaining must have 
cost, two thousand pounds sterling as a legacy for 
Mary and a support in her old age. Think of him in 
person as he is described by Carlyle, who, notwith- 
standing his bruskness and his squinting vision, has 
left us the most lifelike and, in its essence, the most 
appreciative picture of Charles Lamb: 

"He was the leanest of mankind, tiny black breeches but- 
toned to the knee-cap and no farther, surmounting spindle- 
legs also in black, face and head fineish, black, bony, lean, 
and of a Jew type rather; in the eyes a kind of smoky bright- 
ness or confused sharpness ; spoke with a stutter ; in walking 
tottered and shuffled : emblem of imbecility bodily and spirit- 
ual (something of real insanity I have understood), and 
yet something too of humane, ingenuous, pathetic, sportfully 
much-enduring." 

Finally, modify this picture to the extent suggested 
by Mr. Augustine Birrell : 

"One grows sick of the expressions, 'poor Charles Lamb,' 
'gentle Charles Lamb,' as if he were one of those grown-up 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 45 

children of the Leigh Hunt type, who are perpetually beg- 
ging and borrowing through the round of every man's ac- 
quaintance. Charles Lamb earned his own living, paid his 
own way, was the helper, not the helped; a man who was 
beholden to no one, who always came with gifts in his hand, 
a shrewd man, capable of advice, strong in council. Poor 
Lamb, indeed ! Poor Coleridge, robbed of his will ; poor 
Wordsworth, devoured by his own ego; poor Southey, 
writing his tomes and deeming himself a classic; poor Car- 
lyle, with his nine volumes of memoirs, where he 

'Lies like a hedgehog rolled up the wrong way, 
Tormenting himself with his prickles' — 

Call these men poor, if you feel it decent to do so, but not 
Lamb, who was rich in all that makes life valuable or mem- 
ory sweet." 

Then pick up your copy of Lamb's essays, and read. 



WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830) 
Chronology 

1778 Born at Maidstone, Kent, son of Presbyterian min- 
ister. 

1783-1786 With family in America — Philadelphia, Wey- 
mouth. 

1794 Controversial letters, political, ethical. 

1798 Visit of Coleridge. Hazlitt visited Coleridge and 
met Wordsworth. Home reading and study. 
Painting — portraits of Coleridge, Wordsworth, 
Lamb. 

1806 Principles of Human Action, "an Argument in 
defense of the Natural Disinterestedness of the 
Human Mind." 

1812 Parliamentary newspaper reporter; theatrical 
critic; quarrel with editor. 



46 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

1817 Round Table essays in Hunt's Examiner. Quar- 
rel with the Lambs. Characters of Shakespeare's 
Plays. Quarrel with Gifford of the Quarterly 
Review. Lectures, books. 

1 819 Table Talk in London Magazine. Quarrels with 
Hunt, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth. 

1825 Spirit of the Age (critical estimates of contem- 

poraries). 

1826 Plain Speaker. 1827, Life of Napoleon. 
1830 Died, September 18. 

It is not particularly difficult to regard Charles 
Lamb as a hero; there is so much that is thrillingly 
virile in his life that that "proclivity to gin," that 
never-ceasing levity, and those horrible puns constitute 
blemishes at once amiable and insignificant. It is 
harder to erect a pedestal for William Hazlitt. It 
does not predispose us in his favor to learn, as facts 
compel us to learn of Hazlitt, that he was suspicious 
and quarrelsome with respect to his friends; that he 
was bitterly, almost vulgarly, vituperative toward his 
enemies; that he was heartless, even inhuman, in his 
love affairs; and that his bigotry, in politics and re- 
ligion alike, was almost incredible — he boasted that 
he had never read a book through after he was thirty. 

And yet Carlyle, always so sparing with his praise, 
called Hazlitt "a man recognizably of fine natural 
talents and aspirations" ; Robert Louis Stevenson con- 
fessed himself an ardent "Hazlittite," and considered 
Hazlitt the most improperly neglected of English 
writers; Walter Bagehot actually preferred Hazlitt 
to Lamb ; and Charles Lamb himself wrote of Hazlitt 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 47 

in the London Magazine this quaHfied yet practically- 
unsparing praise: "But protesting against much that 
he has written and some things which he chooses to 
do; judging him by his conversation, which I enjoyed 
so long and relished so deeply, or by his books, in 
those places where no clouding passion intervenes, I 
should belie my own conscience if I said less than 
that I think W, H. to be in his natural and healthy 
state one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing. . . . 
I think I shall go to my grave without finding, or ex- 
pecting to find, such another companion." 

These opinions are enough to create for William 
Hazlitt a niche well above the group of authors who 
are merely notable. They serve, moreover, to convert 
one's study of his life from what would otherwise be 
a search for scandalous and putrid morsels, into a 
discriminating scrutiny of those things which kept him 
from being more heroic than he was, and of those 
other things which notwithstanding inheritance and 
environment and innate perversity made him truly 
memorable. 

For some of the influences which made Hazlitt un- 
healthy and unheroic, we must look to the times into 
which he was born. The eighteenth century was 
dominated by a spirit of conformity. In religion the 
emphasis was upon the doctrines of the Established 
Church, at least upon the beliefs which had been 
handed down and which for that reason had a final 
claim upon men's faith. Dr. Samuel Johnson exer- 
cised his great intellect not in critically examining 



48 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

these doctrines but in compelling himself to adopt 
them. In criticism, the effort was constantly to es- 
tablish final criteria, and it was customary to regard 
works which did not conform to recognized criteria 
as ipso facto damned to contempt and oblivion. In 
politics, also, established principles were the prime 
things to be sought and to be regarded : Burke would 
probably not have favored the American Colonies as 
he did^ had not his view been dictated by precedent; 
and when Burke could find nothing in his principles 
or his knowledge of the past to explain the French 
Revolution, he maintained that it was absolutely with- 
out justification, altogether misdirected and inexcus- 
able, and he recognized in the treatment of King 
Louis and Queen Marie Antoinette only the height 
of tragedy, pathos, and unchivalry. 

Before Hazlitt was born, a reaction had set in which 
continued during all his early life. The preaching of 
the two Wesleys compelled many people to recognize 
that religion included far more than the acceptance 
of articles and the observance of forms. Benjamin 
Franklin had dared to think about such matters for 
himself, and to let others know that he did so. In 
literature, Robert Burns sang songs which notwith- 
standing theory and criteria and learned discussion 
as to what ought to be, made men listen to what was. 
Wordsworth and Coleridge promptly followed with 
theories and productions which must have made Dry- 
den and Gray and Dr. Johnson turn uneasily in their 
graves. Even in politics, although the excesses of the 
Revolutionists in France and the animosity necessarily 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 49 

occasioned by the successful rebellion in America only 
confirmed multitudes of reactionaries in their opinions 
— even in politics, there were not a few who welcomed 
the new as good, and, regardless of what they thought 
to be false patriotism, sympathized openly with the 
Colonies and rejoiced in the French Revolution. 

In the family of one of the most ardent of these 
progressives, a son, William Hazlitt, was born in 1778. 
His father had been educated as a Presbyterian min- 
ister : he was something of a Dissenter to begin with. 
But he had dissented even from that denomination, 
and had joined what was then the small and despised 
sect of the Unitarians. He had often met and con- 
versed with Dr. Benjamin Franklin, then on important 
missions from the Colonies to the mother country. 
And when times were not prosperous in his small 
Unitarian church, he came, in 1783, to America. If 
the new nation had proved as unconventional in re- 
ligion as it had proved in politics, Hazlitt would doubt- 
less be to-day regarded as an insignificant or an hon- 
ored American author. But Philadelphia, where the 
family first settled, was too orthodox to pay much at- 
tention to this intellectual rebel, Hazlitt's father ; later 
Boston, although it proved more hospitable and al- 
lowed Mr. Hazlitt to walk in from his temporary home 
in Weymouth and found the first Unitarian society 
in Boston, could not provide him with a decent liv- 
ing; and in 1786 the Hazlitt family returned to a 
Unitarian parish in Wem, Shropshire, where condi- 
tions were meager but endurable. And there, in an 



so ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

atmosphere of religious and political dissent, Hazlitt 
grew up, 

Carlyle attributed Hazlitt's ill-success in the con- 
duct of his life to his lack of "sound culture." Prob- 
ably Carlyle felt that the studies Hazlitt had prose- 
cuted under his father's guidance and at his own sweet 
will there in Wem, although persistent indeed, were 
desultory and ill-balanced. For, intending his son to 
become a Unitarian minister, the elder Hazlitt di- 
rected him in a vast amount of theological and con- 
troversial reading. And of his own accord Hazlitt 
read assiduously and repeatedly from Burke, Junius, 
Rousseau, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Shake- 
speare, and Boccaccio. The only immediate result 
was that gradually he crystallized his opinions, usually 
imconventional ones, on this subject and on that. 
Certain controversial letters written by him were pub- 
lished before he was sixteen. He watched with ad- 
miration the progress of the French Revolution, and 
noted rapturously the rise and the triumphal course 
of Napoleon. 

In 1796, Coleridge came to preach at Wem. His 
sermon and his conversation at the Hazlitt home and 
on the walks which he condescendingly took with 
William, startled the young thinker in his contem- 
plative inactivity. Hazlitt began to feel that his 
thoughts might be worth something, and that he too 
might some day write things which men would gladly 
read and act upon. He visited Coleridge later in the 
Lake Country, and there met Wordsworth. It was 
somewhat as if a youthful student of to-day should 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS Si 

by some combination of circumstances become the 
intimate companion for three or four weeks of Mr. 
Edwin Arlington Robinson and Mr. Alfred Noyes. 
Hazlitt wanted to write; thoughts surged in his mind; 
but his stubborn pen would not express them. Still 
he studied, the works of his old author-friends, the 
poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth, his empirical 
theories of justice and human conduct; he ac- 
cumulated that store of knowledge and experience 
which was to flow so freely in later years, but which 
as yet would not be organized upon any set theme. 
In one place he speaks of these days as the saddest 
of his life, in another place as the happiest. 

At last he gave up thoughts of being a man of 
letters, and undertook to develop another taste which 
he had long exhibited. His older brother, John, was 
a miniature-painter. William began to take lessons 
in painting. At length he secured orders for copies 
of certain pictures in the Louvre, and spent several 
months in 1802- 1803 in Paris filling them. He re- 
turned to England as a portrait-painter; of his works 
the most important is a picture of Qiarles Lamb which 
is in the National Gallery in London. But it was his 
ambition to depict character as accurately and as 
artistically as Rembrandt, and his prompt and frank 
recognition that his limited talents made this impossi- 
ble is surely to his credit. In 1805 he abandoned the 
profession. 

He had already met Charles Lamb and other liter- 
ary men in London. These and other experiences 
seem to have partly unshackled his pen, for in 1806 



52 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

his first book, containing his long-contemplated philo- 
sophical scheme, appeared. It met with no success. 
It did bring him some hack work from the London 
publishers. He had had various love affairs since 
his first departure from Wem; these now, in 1808, 
culminated in his wedding with a Miss Stoddart, a 
friend of the Lambs. In 1812, after a period of com- 
parative inactivity, reflected in his later works through 
accounts of strolls in the woods near his cottage at 
Winterslow, he moved with his family to London, 
determined to make his living there as a literary man. 

He became Parliamentary reporter for the Morn- 
ing Chronicle, acquired from his associates the habit of 
drinking to excess, came to his senses, and foreswore 
liquor forever. He became a theatrical critic. He 
quarreled — ^as he was soon to quarrel with the friends 
whom he should have cherished most — with the editor 
of the paper, and resigned his position. 

At last he was to strike his best vein. Leigh Hunt 
conceived the idea of conducting a paper which should 
contain essays in the manner of The Spectator; differ- 
ent writers were to contribute, and the series was 
to be known as the Round Table. Just as the under- 
taking was launched, however, the renewed activity of 
Bonaparte, whose defeat at Waterloo had chagrined 
and embittered Hazlitt, spread consternation in Lon- 
don; and Hazlitt wrote all of the Round Table papers 
which were published, except a few by Hunt himself. 
The choice accumulations of years here found their 
proper outlet. 

Hazlitt admired Montaigne for his "courage to say 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 53 

as an author what he felt as a man." Hazhtt always 
had an opinion — favorable almost as frequently as ad- 
verse; and he proved to be neither priggish nor in- 
sipid in stating his opinions. He allowed to appear 
not only the admirations which he had long cherished 
for certain authors and certain painters, but also his 
political and his religious principles and animosities. 
To have been more tactful, less frank and outspoken, 
would to his mind have been to desert his principles, 
his conscience. 

One effect was that he was attacked by the staunch 
Tory, Gifford, who edited the Quarterly Review. A 
sample of Gilford's criticism will be enlightening here : 

"We are far from intending to write a single word in 
answer to this loathsome trash . . . but if the creature in 
his endeavor to crawl into the light must take his way over 
the tombs of illustrious men, disfiguring the records of their 
greatness with the slime and filth which marks his track, it 
is right to point out to him that he may be flung back to the 
situation in which Nature designed that he should grovel." 

Hazlitt nourished his resentment in silence until after 
the appearance of his next work, Characters of Shake- 
speare's Plays, the ready sale of which was suddenly 
checked by another foul attack from Gifford. Hazlitt 
then prepared and published a Letter to William Gif- 
ford, Esq., which for virulence and force, if not for 
conciseness and dignity, may be compared to Dr. 
Johnson's famous letter to Lord Chesterfield. It 
begins : 

"Sir, — You have an ugly trick of saying what is not true 
of any one you do not like; and it will be the object of this 



54 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

letter to cure you of it. You say what you please of others : 
it is time you were told what you are. In doing this, give 
me leave to borrow the familiarity of your style: — for the 
fidelity of the picture I shall be answerable, 

"You are a little person, but a considerable cat's-paw; 
and so far worthy of notice." 

One of Hazlitt's essays is entitled The Pleasures 
of Hating; and surely no man to whom hatred was 
not a joy could have contracted or have cherished 
so many enmities as this man. He quarreled with 
Lamb; he fought with all critics like Gifford who at- 
tacked him or the objects of his admiration, consider- 
ing each not merely mistaken or misinformed, but 
deliberately blind, maliciously mendacious, altogether 
contemptible. His criticisms of Shelley, whom he 
could not endure, in Table Talk, caused a breach with 
Leigh Hunt. He also made bitter attacks upon Cole- 
ridge, Southey, and Wordsworth. 

The rosebushes of his essays are well supplied with 
thorns. Observe this footnote to an account of old 
English writers: 

"A splendid edition of Goldsmith has been lately got up 
under the superintendance of Mr. Washington Irvine, with 
a preface and a portrait of each author. By what con- 
catenation of ideas that gentleman arrived at the necessity of 
placing his own portrait before a collection of Goldsmith's 
works, one must have been early imprisoned in transatlantic 
solitudes to understand." 

Here are some more of his barbed thrusts : 

"This last-mentioned player is at present the keeper of the 
Fives-court, and we might recommend to him for a motto 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 55 

over his door, 'who enters here, forgets himself, his country, 
and his friends.' And the best of it is, that by the calcula- 
tion of the odds, none of the three are worth remembering !" 

"Now Cavanaugh [a celebrated Fives player] was as 
good-looking a man as the Noble Lord and much better look- 
ing than the Right Hon. Secretary. He had a clear, open 
countenance, and did not look sideways or down, like Mr. 
Murray, the bookseller." 

"A rich man is not a great man, except to his dependants 
and his steward. A lord is a great man in the idea we have 
of his ancestry, and probably of himself, if we know nothing 
of him but his title." 

"If we wish to know the force of human genius we should 
read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of 
human learning we may study his commentators." 

If he did not quarrel with his wife, he did exhibit 
gross indifference toward her, and that from the stand- 
point of each must have been worse than quarreling; 
after 1819 they lived apart. By 1822 he had become 
infatuated with the daughter of his landlord, a Miss 
Walker; and he and Mrs. Hazlitt went together to 
Scotland, where divorce seemed to be more easily ob- 
tainable than in England. On his return to London, 
a single man, as he thought, Hazlitt found Miss Walker 
about to be married to a man of her own station. He 
threw off a naked account of his passion for her, 
published it, forgot her, and two years later married 
a Mrs. Bridgewater, of whom we know simply that 
she had three hundred pounds a year. When she 
discovered shortly afterward, while Hazlitt was tour- 



S6 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

ing the Continent (on her money), that their marriage 
was after all bigamous, the Scotch divorce not being 
really legal, she refused to return to Hazlitt, and he 
never saw her again. 

Yet this bright, quarrelsome, fickle man, on his 
deathbed in 1830, waiting for the fifty pounds which 
he had requested Jeffrey to send him for medicine, 
gruel, and nurse's fees — this man, rich only in friends 
who, like Charles Lamb, would not remain estranged 
from him, says what of himself in his last moments? 

"Well, I have lived a happy life !" 

There is every reason to believe that he was not de- 
lirious when he said it. 

To understand that remark we must turn away 
from his life, agreeing here with Carlyle when he says 
"Poor Hazlitt!" We must turn to his miscellaneous 
writings — not to the unfortunate Life of Napoleon, 
which could not have displaced in popular favor the 
one that had just been published by Sir Walter Scott, 
and which, moreover, made a hero of the man with 
whose name English mothers had long been fright- 
ening their children into obedience; we must turn 
not to the scurrilous Gifford attacks, not to the pseudo- 
philosophical and "scrupulously dry" treatise on Hu- 
man Action: but to the intimate, reflective, self-re- 
vealing, eloquent effusions of the Round Table, Table 
Talk, and the Plain Speaker. Sauntering in these 
fragrant and luxuriant gardens, we shall see why 
Stevenson kept Hazlitt always beside him, why Haz- 
litt is called the most eloquent of essayists, why so 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 57 

intelligent a man as Walter Bagehot could prefer 
Hazlitt even to Lamb, and why Charles Lamb could 
say of Hazlitt that "in his natural and healthy state" 
he was "one of the wisest and finest spirits breath- 
ing." 

WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859) 
Chronology 
1783 Born, April 3, New York. 
1802 Jonathan Oldstyle Papers in local newspaper. 
1804-1806 First European trip, health and pleasure^ 
1806 Salmagundi. 
1809 Knickerbocker History of New York. Death of 

his fiancee, Miss Hoffman. 
1815-1832 Second European sojourn; business, literature. 
1 819 The Sketch Book. 1822, Bracebridge Hall. 1824, 
Tales of a Traveller. 1828, Life of Columbus. 
1833 Sunnyside purchased. 
1842 Visit of Charles Dickens. 
1842-1846 Minister to Spain. 

1855 Wolf erf s Roost. 1855- 1859, Life of Washington. 
1859 Died, November 29. 

One day in the 1820's, so a well-authenticated story 
runs, an English lady and her daughter, passing 
through an art gallery in Italy, paused before a bust of 
Washington. 

"Who was Washington, mamma?" said the 
daughter. 

"Why, my dear, don't you know!" her mother re- 
plied. "He wrote the Sketch Book." 

This anecdote reminds one of three significant 
things. In the first place, the author of the Sketch 
Book was really named for the great American general, 



S8 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

had been seen and blessed by George Washington, 
and wrote as his last great work, one of mingled 
scholarship and devotion, a Life of Washington. 

Again this anecdote indicates the ignorance which 
prevailed in England concerning America. Mr. Arnold 
Bennett has been severely criticized for the misleading 
impressions of this country which he has given out 
since his visit here. If Mr. Bennett has committed 
errors, he has done so in illustrious company. Charles 
Dickens nearly seventy years ago did much the same 
thing. Footnotes and text of Hazlitt's writings show 
how much of mental obliquity and bad taste he was 
willing to attribute to "transatlantic solitudes." And 
every American reader of The Deserted Village won- 
ders how Goldsmith could honestly have been so mis- 
informed as to infest the meadows and groves of 
Georgia with "dark scorpions," "vengeful snakes," 
and "crouching tigers." Doubtless most English 
ladies to-day are aware that Mr. Henry James was in 
no way to be confused with Patrick Henry, and that 
Dr. Booker T. Washington was not literally a 
descendant of "the father of his country"; possibly 
even the lady in the Italian gallery was a ridiculous 
exception to the generality of English ladies in the 
1820's. The ignorance of the two nations concerning 
each other is still very great, however. And in the 
early part of the nineteenth century that ignorance was 
as gross as it was exasperating and unfortunate. The 
man we are considering, as we shall see, did more 
than any other to dispel this mutual ignorance. 

The little anecdote indicates yet one thing more: 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 59 

that to even an unlearned woman of the 1820's the 
Sketch Book was at least in name familiar. A few 
American books, most of them by Charles Brockden 
Brown, had before that time been sold in England; 
but they had not introduced household words. The 
Sketch Book, the product of pioneering, Indian-fight- 
ing, solitary America, took in England ; and doubtless 
Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane are known — as 
well, perhaps, as King Arthur and Robin Hood are 
known — by English people who would locate the Hud- 
son in Virginia, and Sleepy Hollow within twenty 
minutes* walk of Bunker Hill. 

On April 3, 1783, just five months before the Treaty 
of Paris was signed by Great Britain and the United 
States, Washington Irving, essayist and historian, was 
born in New York City. The town already consid- 
ered itself a metropolis, although it contained less than 
twenty-five thousand inhabitants, and where the City 
Hall now divides endless lines of travel and traffic 
Irving and his boy friends played on open meadows, 
over jutting rocks and boulders, and by the side of a 
brook rippling down to the Hudson. Many of the 
farmers who brought their products in boats and carts 
to the markets of the city talked only Dutch. And 
when in 1803 Irving accepted an invitation to go on 
a journey to Ogdensburg on the St. Lawrence River, 
he was exposed to hardships greater than one would 
expect in Labrador or in western Canada to-day: he 
heard wolves howling about the camp at night, he 
came near being murdered by a jealous Indian, and at 



€o ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Ogdensburg he helped make out deeds for those of the 
party who wished to settle in the newly-planned town. 

His parents were not colonists of long standing: 
they had come to New York, his father from the 
Orkney Islands, and his mother from England, in 
1763; but in a town well sprinkled with Tories, they 
were staunch patriots. When their youngest child 
was born, the mother determined to name him for the 
masterful general of the Colonial forces. And one 
day when Washington Irving was a small boy, a Scotch 
servant who was caring for him followed the Presi- 
dent of the United States into a shop and secured for 
the child the blessing of the great general and states- 
man. 

The boy was not altogether healthy, but neither was 
he an invalid; and if he learned little Latin and less 
mathematics, and spent much time roaming over Man- 
hattan Island, hunting along the Hudson, chatting 
with the Dutch river captains, and reading Defoe 
and Addison and such other lively works as came 
his way, it was doubtless because he had an un- 
concealed distaste for more serious pursuits. His 
household was one of those where to seek amusement 
was to court the devil; but in 1849 lining pointed 
out to his nephew the route — window ledge to shed 
roof to board fence and so forth — which it had been 
his custom to follow in returning to the theater, after 
he had come home for family prayers at nine o'clock, 
in order to see the after-piece instead of going to 
bed. 

Two of his brothers attended Columbia College; 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 6i 

Irving did not. The only promising performance 
of these early days was the writing of a series of 
letters, closely modeled upon The Spectator and The 
Tatler, for his brother's newspaper, letters quite ap- 
propriately signed "Jonathan Oldstyle." A hundred 
years later a boy like Irving would probably have 
tried to be original in style and subject-matter; in 
1802, to imitate Addison closely was to do something 
worthy of the highest praise. 

By 1804 Irving's health had greatly declined. It 
was arranged that he should seek improvement in a 
journey to Europe. The captain of the vessel on 
which he embarked said as the young man came aboard 
that he was destined to go overboard before the ship 
reached the other side. But before the six weeks' trip 
was ended, Irving was climbing all over the vessel, 
and after a few weeks on the Continent nothing more 
was ever said of consumption. 

He used his opportunities chiefly for pleasure. He 
made some pretense of studying in Paris, but he 
records attending botany lectures and theatrical per- 
formances in the ratio of one to thirteen. At Messina 
he saw Nelson's fleet on its way to the battle of 
Trafalgar; and later in London he saw the body of 
the great admiral, lying in state at Greenwich. An 
Italian vessel in which he was proceeding to Sicily 
was overpowered and ransacked by pirates, grim 
humorists who in return for the liquor and provisions 
which they had seized gave a receipt and an order on 
the British consul for payment therefor. He did ac- 
quire some proficiency in European languages, and he 



62 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

did receive a polish which made him acceptable and 
at home in all sorts of company. 

In 1806 he returned to New York, ostensibly to 
study law, but really to be a thoroughly charming 
man-about-town. His biographer gives an anecdote 
which illustrates some of the features of his life in 
these days. A friend named Ogden, it seems, had left 
a certain gathering "with a brain half bewildered by 
the number of bumpers he had been compelled to 
drink. He told Irving the next day that in going 
home he had fallen through a grating, which had 
carelessly been left open, into a vault beneath. The 
solitude, he said, was rather dismal at first, but several 
others of the guests fell in, in the course of the even- 
ing, and they had on the whole quite a pleasant night 
of it." The real character of Irving had not yet ap- 
peared. 

He was admitted to the bar in 1806. Shortly after- 
wards, in conjunction with James K. Paulding, and 
wholly, it seems, as a means of amusing himself and 
the town, he made another sally as a writer. This 
time it was Salmagundi, a series of audacious papers, 
independently published, and intended, as they de- 
clared, "to instruct the young, reform the old, correct 
the town, and castigate the age." A single paragraph 
from the prospectus will illustrate its boldness : 

"We beg the public particularly to understand that we 
solicit no patronage. We are determined, on the contrary, 
that the patronage shall be entirely on our side. We have 
nothing to do with the pecuniary concerns of the paper; its 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 63 

success will yield us neither pride nor profit — nor will its 
failure occasion us either loss or mortification. We advise 
the public, therefore, to purchase our numbers merely for 
their own sakes: — if they do not, let them settle the affair 
with their consciences and posterity." 

It ran for a year, twenty numbers in all, appearing 
with great irregularity, and ceasing as suddenly and 
as inexplicably as it had begun. With this, perhaps, 
developed that confidence in his powers which later, 
when he was pricked to action by necessity rather 
than by the spirit of fun, determined his career. 

He made visits to Albany, to Philadelphia, to Balti- 
more and Washington, partly on business for his 
brothers and himself, largely on social errands. And 
in 1809, again largely for amusement, he produced 
the work which was to make him famous to his con- 
temporaries if not to posterity. A certain Dr. Samuel 
Mitchell, one of the Dryasdust kind of antiquarians, 
had published an erudite but dull and pedantic work 
called Picture of New York, portraying first the 
aborigines and then, formally and prosaically, the suc- 
cessive events in the town's history. Irving and his 
brother, Peter, began a burlesque of this work. They 
began with the Creation of the World! Fortunately, 
it is said, Peter Irving had to go abroad on business ; 
and Washington's skill and taste shaped the entire 
work. The ingenuity which had conceived and exe- 
cuted Salmagundi now found more exalted exercise. 

On October 25, 1809, this notice appeared in the 
Evening Post: 



64 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

"DISTRESSING 

"Left his lodgings some time since, and has not since been 
heard of, a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black 
coat and cocked hat, by the name of KNICKERBOCKER. 
As there are some reasons for believing he is not entirely 
in his right mind, and as great anxiety is entertained about 
him, any information concerning him left either at the Co- 
lumbian Hotel, Mulberry Street, or at the office of this paper, 
will be thankfully received." 

About two weeks later a letter addressed to the editor 
and signed "A Traveller" informed the public that a 
person answering the description had been seen by 
passengers on the Albany stage resting by the roadside 
a little above Kingsbridge. Ten days later, a letter 
signed by the landlord of the Columbian Hotel ap- 
peared, stating that: 

"Nothing satisfactory has been heard of the old gentleman 
since; but a very curious kind of a written hook has been 
found in his room in his own handwriting. Now I wish you 
to notice him, if he is still alive, that if he does not return 
and pay off his bill, for board and lodgings, I shall have to 
dispose of his Book, to satisfy me for the same," 

Finally, in December, the actual publication of A His- 
tory of New York was announced, with the informa- 
tion: 

"This work was found in the chamber of Mr. Diedrich 
Knickerbocker, the old gentleman whose sudden and mysteri- 
ous disappearance has been noticed. It is published in order 
to discharge certain debts he has left behind." 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 65 

The mock dulness and sly pedantry of the work 
grip the alert reader at once. The following para- 
graph, which concludes two chapters of discussion as 
to the nature and formation of the earth, conveys 
some idea of its style and spirit: 

"One thing, however, appears certain — from the unanimous 
authority of the before-quoted philosophers, supported by the 
evidence of our own senses (which, though very apt to de- 
ceive us, may be cautiously admitted as additional testimony), 
it appears, I say, and I make the assertion deliberately, 
without fear of contradiction, that this globe really was cre- 
ated, and that it is composed of land and water. It farther 
appears that it is curiously divided and parcelled out into 
continents and islands, among which I boldly declare the re- 
nowned ISLAND OF NEW-YORK will be found by any 
one who seeks for it in its proper place." 

This stupendous piece of humor aroused some re- 
sentment among the Dutch people whose ancestors 
were satirized; but for the most part it awakened 
only amusement. Walter Scott among foreign readers 
was particularly appreciative, and asked a mutual 
friend to be sure to let him have anything else which 
might come from the same source. Some readers 
thought it the work of Scott. 

While Irving was at work upon Knickerbocker, 
Miss Matilda Hoffman, daughter of the man with 
whom he had been studying law, Irving's intended 
bride, died after a distressing illness. Her Bible and 
Prayer Book he kept with him throughout his life; 
he never could bear to hear Miss Hoffman spoken of, 
never of his own accord referred to her; and through- 



66 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

out his life, although he met the most gifted and at- 
tractive women of his time and became very friendly 
with some of them, he never gave to any the place at 
his side left vacant by this girl's death. The spectacle 
presented by Charles Lamb in love affairs is hardly 
superior to the spectacle of the faithful Irving. 

At length Irving became a business partner of his 
brothers'. His duties were almost nominal, and he 
continued his round of enjoyment and mental in- 
activity. When the War of 1812 broke out, he de- 
plored it — and remained inactive, until in 18 14 the 
government buildings in Washington were burned by 
the British; he then acted as secretary and military 
aid to the governor of New York until practically 
the end of the war in 181 5. 

In May, 18 15, he sailed for England on a visit to 
his brother. He was destined to remain abroad until 
he came home loaded with honors, the recognized 
"father of American letters," seventeen years later. 
Soon after reaching England his brother became ill, 
and the affairs of the firm became perplexing. He 
made occasional visits to London and to other places 
of interest; one visit was to Sir Walter Scott at 
Abbotsford. In 1818, he and his brothers escaped 
from their business difficulties by going into bank- 
ruptcy. 

And now the character of Irving, which had gradu- 
ally been forming, began to appear as it really was. 
He determined to win a living by his pen. An offer 
of a clerkship with good pay in the Navy Depart- 
ment at Washington came to him, but he resolutely 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 67 

declined It. He had for some time been revolving 
plans for a literary production ; he now set about exe- 
cuting his plans. And in March, 18 19, he sent to his 
brother in New York — for he had no slightest ex- 
pectation of having the work printed or read in Eng- 
land — the early sections of what we know as the 
Sketch Book; other portions followed, and from May, 
18 19, on into the next year, successive numbers ap- 
peared. In February, 1820, so great had grown the 
danger of having an unauthorized and inaccurate re- 
print appear in England, Irving undertook on his own 
responsibility to print the work there. 

Its success in both countries was very great. The 
reviewers were almost unanimous in praise of it. 
Scott wrote his most hearty approval, and persuaded 
Murray, the publisher, to take over the responsibility 
for the English edition. 

Irving thus described his modest purpose in writ- 
ing the book : 

"I have attempted no lofty theme, nor sought to look wise 
and learned, which appears to be very much the fashion 
among our American writers, at present. I have preferred 
addressing myself to the feeling and fancy of the reader, 
more than to his judgment. My writings, therefore, may 
appear light and trifling in our country of philosophers and 
politicians; but if they possess merit in the class of litera- 
ture to which they belong, it is all to which I aspire in the 
work. I seek only to blow a flute accompaniment in the 
national concert, and leave others to play the fiddle and 
French horn." 

The preface to the work itself, no less than the essays, 
shows how his boyish spirit and humor had mellowed 



« ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

and ripened. The prevailing kindness and good nature 
of the book, the absence from it of all jealousy, ani- 
mosity and provincialism distinguish it among works 
of that time possessing Anglo-American significance. 

For nearly two years Irving was able to do little 
further work. He never entertained an exalted idea 
of his abilities, and the praise which was showered 
upon him seemed to paralyze him with wonder as to 
whether or not he deserved it. He traveled on the 
continent, returned to England, mingled with society, 
and at length, in 1822, printed Bracebridge Hall, 
simultaneously in America and in England, 

The rest of Irving's life is of minor consequence 
to the student of essays. In 1824 appeared his Tales 
of a Traveller, consisting, like the earlier works, of 
mingled tale and essay. He was for a time attache to 
the American legation at Madrid, was there met by 
Longfellow (then traveling in preparation for his 
work as Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin 
College), and there produced his Life of Columbus in 
1828. Later he was secretary to the legation at Lon- 
don. His work there was so confining that it left 
him little time for composition or for society; and 
when in 1831 an opportunity came for resigning with 
honor, he seized the opportunity, and returned to 
America. He was received as befitted the man who 
had established a position for American letters; he 
was given a dinner, and responded in great trepida- 
tion to a toast — ^the only speech he ever made. 

His activity was very great. Tales of the AlhamWa, 
called by Prescott the "Spanish Sketch Book," soon ap- 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 69 

peared. He declined flattering political opportunities. 
In 1833 he purchased and began to develop Sunny side, 
or, as he first called it, the Roost (rest), on the Hud- 
son below Tarrytown. Here he supported in great 
comfort his brothers and his nieces. Various works 
written by him there appeared from time to time. 

An impressive instance of Irving's self-denial is 
recorded. In 1838, Irving learned that his friend 
Prescott was planning to begin his study of the con- 
quest of Mexico. It was a field which Irving, un- 
known to Prescott, had long contemplated, and in 
which he had already collected some material. Rather 
than compete with Prescott, however, Irving now 
promptly and uncomplainingly abandoned the project. 

In 1842, Charles Dickens visited America; the one 
writer to whom he paid court was Washington Irving. 
Irving presided at a dinner in Dickens' honor, tried 
to make a speech, and broke down in the middle of it. 
The same year at the request of Daniel Webster, 
Secretary of State, Irving accepted the important of- 
fice of minister to Spain. For four years he endured 
the burden of official duties, the interruptions in his 
work upon his Life of Washington, and the absence 
from his beloved Sunnyside. He then returned home. 

At length he prepared a revised edition of his 
works. Struggling against failing health, he produced 
Wolf erf s Roost in 1855, a series of essays equal in 
merit to those of the Sketch Book and of Bracehridge 
Hall. And between 1855 and 1859 appeared his Life 
of Washington. He now began to dread the loss of 
his faculties. "I do not fear death," he said, "but I 



70 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

would like to go down with all sail set." And he 
had his wish, his mind remaining clear to the end, 
which came on November 29th, 1859. 

If each of the authors so far considered had been 
able to preserve for posterity only one or two of his 
works, which, one wonders, would he have selected? 
Lamb might have picked the Elia essays; but presum- 
ably if fondness for Mary had not made him take 
their joint work, the Tales from Shakespeare, his own 
inherent dignity would have suffered only Specimens 
from the English Dramatic Poets. Hazlitt would 
surely have thrown upon the life-raft, first, his Life 
of Napoleon, and, second, that discovery of The Dis- 
interestedness of Human Action. Irving surely would 
have taken one or more of his biographies — had they 
not won for him an LL.D. from Oxford University 
and the solid reputation he enjoyed? 

Sooner or later in the centuries stretching name- 
lessly out before us, our great libraries must sort their 
collections. It is inevitable that just as works of ob- 
scure writers are now consigned to obscure vaults, so, 
in some future time, either to obscure vaults or to the 
trash heap must go the obscure works of noted 
authors. Will Lamb's probable choice be justified at 
that time? Surely Hazlitt's will not. Of Irving's 
works, which will still be allowed space on the work- 
ing shelves? The Knickerbocker History, doubtless, 
at least in a thin-paper edition ; and surely those lucu- 
brations, antique in flavor but forever modern in their 
humor, their kindliness and good nature — the essays 
and sketches of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 71 

Here, then, is the choice essayist whom we read 
in the Sketch Book, in Bracehridge Hall, and in Wol- 
fert's Roost; sprightly, courtly, and patriotic; one who 
for fifty years was faithful to the memory of his early 
love; a man who would not claim for his own a 
field of study upon which a friend had set his heart; 
a spirit which in an age of political and artistic ani- 
mosity and jealousy nourished neither. Few succinct 
analyses of his character can equal Lowell's in A 
Fable for Critics: 

"To a true poet-heart and the fun of Dick Steele 
Throw in all of Addison, minus the chill. 
With the whole of that partnership's stock and good will, 
Mix well, and while stirring, hum o'er, as a spell. 
The fine old English Gentleman, simmer it well. 
Sweeten just to your own private liking, then strain, 
That only the finest and clearest remain. 
Let it stand out of doors till a soul it receives 
From the warm lazy sun loitering down through green 

leaves 
And you'll find a choice nature, not wholly deserving 
A name either English or Yankee, — just Irving." 

(JAMES HENRY) LEIGH HUNT (1784-1859) 
Chronology 
1784 Born, Southgate, Middlesex, October 19. 
1792 Entered Christ's Hospital School. 

1807 Theatrical criticisms collected and published. 

1808 Began weekly Examiner with brother. 1812, Prince 

Regent affair; convicted for libel; imprisoned. 
1 81 5- 18 1 7 The Round Table essays, with Hazlitt in Ex- 
aminer. 1816, Introduced Keats to Shelley and. 
li both to public. 



n ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

1816 Story of Rimini, metrical version of Paola and 

Francesca story. 
1819 The Indicator, periodical, seventy-six weeks, 
1821-1825 Italian sojourn; failure of the Liberal. 
1828 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. 
1830-1832 The Tatler, four-page daily, 
1833 Neighbor of the Carlyles in Chelsea. 
1840 Play, A Legend of Florence, at Covent Garden. 
1844 Poems of Imagination and Fancy, a collection. 
1847 Benefit theatrical performance by Dickens. 
1850 Autobiography ; revised, 1859. 
1852 Dickens' Bleak House — Harold Skimpole. 
1859 Death at Putney, August 28. 

Many people who look perplexed w^hen one men- 
tions Leigh Hunt, brighten up when one adds — 
author of Ahoii Ben Ad hem. People usually brighten 
still more when they hear also these other lines of 
his: 

"Jenny kissed me when we met. 

Jumping from the chair she sat in; 
Time, you thief, who love to get 

Sweets into your list, put that in: 
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad. 

Say that health and wealth have miss'd me. 
Say I'm growing old, but add, 
Jenny kiss'd me !" 

And when one recalls these two effusions he already 
has a fairly comprehensive notion of Leigh Hunt. 
Simple and direct in his religious views, full of child- 
like delight over attention or appreciation or favors 
from others, able to exalt the most commonplace emo- 
tions into charming literary products, he was, as 
Carlyle said, "free, cheery, idly melodious as bird on 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 73 

bough." What misery and trials Hazlitt enjoyed 
grumbhng about, and Lamb had the stamina cheer- 
fully to withstand, Hunt was so constituted as never 
seriously to regard at all. The two ideas expressed 
in the poems referred to — the thought that love of 
one's fellowmen (he meant not service as we should 
mean to-day, but simple spiritual sympathy and 
yearning) would merit the blessing of God's love, and 
the recollection that a beautiful woman (the original 
is said to have been Mrs. Carlyle) had shown him 
signal favor — these were genuine consolations for a 
grown-up child such as Hunt was. 

Three marked characteristics of Hunt as a man can 
readily be traced to his parents : these are his irre- 
sponsibility, financial in particular; his sensitiveness — 
sentimentalism it often became ; and the peculiar sweet- 
ness and beauty of his religious convictions. His 
father, a descendant of one of the earliest Barbadoes 
settlers, was the sanguine, impractical parent. He had 
been educated in Philadelphia, had been persecuted 
there as a Loyalist at the outbreak of the Revolution, 
and returning to England had become a popular 
preacher. He was popular also, however, at dinner- 
tables where wine circulated. And when people came 
to him in distress, he went security for them. When 
at length he received a Loyalist Pension of one hun- 
dred pounds a year, he was obliged to mortgage it. 
A knock at the door of the Hunt home all too often 
meant the arrival of another bailiff. And the first 
room Leigh Hunt had any recollection of was a prison. 

His sensitiveness Hunt inherited from his mother. 



74 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

She was of a Philadelphia family of Quakers. The 
flight of her husband from that city pursued by a mob 
seems to have raised to a passion her innate horror 
of war. She would make long circuits with her son to 
avoid the proximity of a fight in the streets or even 
soldiers strolling in the parks. She inculcated in her 
son the principle of not striking back. There are 
numerous examples of her tender care for ac- 
quaintances or dependents whom others had aban- 
doned. This anecdote, related by Leigh Hunt in his 
Autobiography, is characteristic: 

"One holiday, in a severe winter, as she was taking me 
home, she was petitioned for charity by a woman sick and 
ill-clothed. It was in Blackfriars Road, I think about mid- 
way. My mother, with the tears in her eyes, turned up a 
gateway, or some such place, and beckoning the woman to 
follow, took off her flannel petticoat and gave it her. It is 
supposed that a cold which ensued fixed the rheumatism 
upon her for life. Actions like these have doubtless been 
often performed, and do not of necessity imply any great 
virtue in the performer: but they do if they are of a piece 
with the rest of the character. Saints have been made for 
charities no greater." 

Both parents possessed a religion that was above 
all tender, not vindictive, not dogmatic. Hunt's father 
began as a clergyman of the Established Church with 
a weakness for preaching charity sermons — a weak- 
ness formally frowned upon by the unevangelical 
Church authorities of the time. Both parents were 
led by their unorthodox speculations to become Uni- 
tarians, with also a firm belief in Universalist prin- 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 75 

ciples. It was to them as to Leigh Hunt at once horri- 
ble and absurd to think that there is such a thing as 
eternal punishment. To think other than that "all 
mankind, even the demons themselves, will be finally 
restored to happiness" was for them the height of 
impiety toward Almighty God. These beliefs were not 
passive, but active and vivid; they permeate Hunt's 
writings. We shall see how truly Hunt in these dif- 
ferent ways was the son of his parents. 

Leigh Hunt, or, as he was christened, James Henry 
Leigh Hunt, entered Christ's Hospital School in 1792 
as Coleridge and Lamb quitted it. Because of a 
hesitation in his speech which would have prevented 
his success as a clergyman, he was not sent to the 
University. Reading, writing, and the simple joys of 
home life seem to have occupied him as a youth. At 
seventeen, a volume of his Juvenilia was published by 
subscription. A gift from his father of a set of the 
British Classics, a collection of eighteenth century 
periodical essays, uncovered the vein which he was to 
work most successfully in life: he began writing es- 
says, and soon found publishers. Some theatrical 
criticisms, first written for his brother's newspaper, 
were reprinted in 1807 as Critical Essays on Per- 
formances, etc. This method of reprinting his peri- 
odical essays in books he followed throughout his 
literary career. Various clerkships followed; thei;i, 
in conjunction with his brother, he established in 1808 
an independent, liberal weekly newspaper called The 
Examiner. This paper is said to have raised the tone 



It ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

of newspaper writing, then none too high, by its con- 
sistent fairness, tolerance, and good taste. In it ap- 
peared between 1815 and 1817 those Round Table es- 
says, written some by Hunt, mostly by Hazlitt. 

The brothers Hunt were, however, rather too inde- 
pendent for their times. An article in The Examiner 
protesting against military floggings brought upon 
them a court trial which ended in acquittal. Un- 
affected by this narrow escape, they published another 
article which exposed the blatant flattery of certain 
contemporary verses regarding the Prince Regent and 
gave a plain description of that unsavory gentleman. 
This brought on another libel suit. This time con- 
viction followed, with sentence of two years' im- 
prisonment and a fine of five hundred pounds, to be 
remitted on pledge of abstinence from such attacks in 
the future. Both brothers refused to give this pledge, 
and Leigh Hunt served the full term in Surrey Gaol. 

His health almost forsook him during this period, 
but his friends and his spirits did not. Lamb records 
that Hunt had so transformed his "cell" with furni- 
ture, wall-paper, and flowers that it seemed a fairy 
bower. His wife, whom he had married in 1809, was 
allowed to live in the jail with him. He continued 
to edit The Examiner from the jail. It was there, 
in 1 8 16, that Hunt introduced Keats to Shelley; and 
from there, through The Examiner, he introduced 
Keats and Shelley to the public. 

Hunt's first long poem. The Story of Rimini, was 
a version of the Paolo and Francesca story; it ap- 
peared in 1 8 18. A complete list of his poems, his 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 77 

books, and the periodicals on which he was successively 
engaged is superfluous. The most notable of his 
works are The Indicator, which ran for seventy-six 
weeks, beginning in 1819; The Tatler, a four-page 
daily, which from 1830 to 1832 Hunt wrote and pub- 
lished all alone; Imagination and Fancy, a collection 
of extracts with critical notices and an Essay on 
Poetry, published in 1844; arid his Autobiography 
(regarded by Carlyle as second in biographical writ- 
ing only to Boswell's Johnson), first published in 1850, 
and brought up to date in 1859. 

Two painful incidents remain to be chronicled. In 
1 82 1, Shelley and Byron, both then living in Italy, 
persuaded Hunt to undertake at Pisa the editing of a 
quarterly magazine which from that point could be 
more liberal than would be safe in London. After 
many delays Hunt arrived in Italy with his family. 
The project soon proved forlorn. In July, 1821, 
Shelley was drowned off the Italian coast. Hunt 
wrote the epitaph for his tomb. Byron's interest in 
the magazine, always fickle, now cooled. Hunt at first 
moved about, to Greece and elsewhere, with Byron, 
finding it harder and harder to support himself and his 
family. At length, in 1825, he managed to return to 
England. And in 1828 in a work called Lord Byron 
and Some of His Contemporaries, he revealed much 
about the poet, by that time deceased, which as Byron's 
favored acquaintance he ought rather to have con- 
cealed. As the Italian project was the great mis- 
fortune, this publication was the great blunder of his 
life. 



78 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

The other painful event occurred in 1852. The 
character of Harold Skimpole, in Dickens' Bleak 
House published that year, was at once thought by 
Hunt's acquaintances to be a caricature of Hunt — 
his improvidence, his sentimentalism, his good nature. 
Now Dickens had been Hunt's generous friend; in 
1847, with an amateur company, Dickens had given 
a benefit theatrical performance for Hunt. And 
Dickens promptly disclaimed any but the most in- 
direct connection between Hunt and Harold Skim- 
pole, But the likeness was there, and the facts 
rankled. 

In 1857, Hunt's wife died. In 1859, appeared his 
last series of papers, in The Spectator. On August 28, 
1859, he died in Putney, asking eager questions about 
current events and about his relatives. Over his tomb 
in Kensal Green Cemetery his bust has been erected 
with the inscription, 

"Write me as one who loved his fellow men." 



These are the bare facts. Something of the spirit 
of Leigh Hunt is indicated by that stand for the truth 
in the Prince-Regent case, and by that patient en- 
durance of imprisonment. Something more is indi- 
cated by the persistence with which he pursued his 
literary career, often subsisting on bread and water, 
often during the worst years (1834- 1840) going with- 
out food, — lacking grit, perhaps, as Hawthorn^ said, 
yet ever courageous, sweet-tempered, forgiving. A 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 79 

few anecdotes will perhaps round out a comprehensive 
idea of the man. 

Along with a hatred of quarreling, Hunt's mother 
had transmitted to him a disgust for profanity. He 
says: 

"she had produced in me such a horror, or rather such 
an intense idea of even violent words, and of the commonest 
trivial oath, that being led one day, perhaps by the very 
excess of it, to snatch a 'fearful joy' in its utterance, it 
gave so much remorse that for some time afterward I could 
not receive a bit of praise, or a pat of encouragement on 
the head, without thinking to myself, *Ah, they little sus- 
pect that I am the boy who said d — n it.' " 

Observe the impressibility, the sensitiveness, which 
are indicated by this middle-age memory : 

"That is a pleasant time of life, the play-going time in 
youth, when the coach is packed full to go to the theatre, and 
brothers and sisters, parents and lovers (none of whom, 
perhaps, go very often) are all wafted together in a flurry of 
expectation; when the only wish as they go (except with 
the lovers) is to go as fast as possible, and no sound is so 
delightful as the cry of 'Bill of the Play'; when the smell 
of links in the darkest and muddiest winter's night is charm- 
ing; and the steps of the coach are let down; and a roar of 
hoarse voices round the door, and mud-shine on the pave- 
ment, are accompanied with the sight of the warm-looking 
lobby which is about to be entered; and they enter, and pay, 
and ascend the pleasant stairs, and begin to hear the silence 
of the house, perhaps the first jingle of the music; and the 
box is entered amidst some little awkwardness in descending 
to their places and being looked at; and at length they sit, 
and are become used to by their neighbors, and shawls and 



8o ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

smiles are adjusted, and the play-bill is handed round or 
pinned to the cushion, and the gods are a little noisy, and 
the music veritably commences, and at length the curtain is 
drawn up, and the first delightful syllables are heard: 
'Ah! my dear Charles, when did you see the lovely Olivia?' 
'Oh ! my dear Sir George, talk not to me of Olivia. The 
cruel guardian,' etc." 

Again, Hunt thrills us with the delicacy of his senti- 
ment in this : 

"Dr. Young talks of— 

" 'That hideous sight, a naked human heart ;' 
a line not fit to have been written by a human being. ... I 
don't believe it. I don't believe he had a right thus to cal- 
umniate it, much less that of his neighbor, and of the whole 
human race. 

"I saw a worse sight than the heart, in a journey which 
I took into a neighboring county. It was an infant, all 
over sores, and cased in steel; the result of the irregularities 
of its father: and I confess that I would rather have seen 
the heart of the very father of that child, than I would the 
child himself. ... I never beheld such a sight, before or 
since, except in one of the pictures of Hogarth in his Rake's 
Progress; and I sadden this page with the recollection, for 
the same reason that induced him to paint it." 

One of the most striking things about Hunt is his 
whole-souled admiration of human life regardless of 
the hardships he experienced. In one essay he fancies 
some of the comforts and joys of heaven. Among the 
blessings he enumerates are a friend; a mistress (the 
term, he says, is legal, since there is in heaven no mar- 
rying nor giving in marriage) ; books — Spenser and 
Shakespeare shall write new ones, and Scott forty 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 8i 

more as good as the Scotch ones; tea for breakfast; 
horses to ride ; and, finally, this : 

''The weather will be extremely fine, but not without 
such varieties as shall hinder it from being tiresome. April 
will dress the whole country in diamonds; and there will be 
enough cold in winter to make a fire pleasant of an evening. 
The fire will be made of sweet-smelling turf and sunbeams; 
but it will have a look of coal. If we choose now and then, 
we shall even have inconveniences." 

His essay is entitled An Earth Upon Heaven! 

In his Deaths of Little Children, the favorite essay 
(how pathetic to recall!) of Charles Lamb, written 
within sight of the grave of one of his own children, 
he expresses this delicate and beautiful consolation: 

"Those who have lost an infant are never, as it were, with- 
out an infant child. They are the only persons who, in one 
sense, retain it always; and they furnish their neighbors 
with the same idea. The other children grow up to manhood 
and womanhood, and suffer all the changes of mortality. 
This one alone is rendered an immortal child. Death has 
arrested it with its kindly harshness, and blessed it into an 
eternal image of youth and innocence." 

Even for the Prince Regent, whose conduct filled 
him with disgust and on whose account he had suf- 
fered much, he had no vindictiveness. In concluding 
the account of The Examiner incident in his Auto- 
biography, he says : 

"Neither have I any quarrel, at this distance of time, with 
the Prince Regent; for though his frivolity, his tergiversa- 



82 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

tion, and his treatment of his wife, will not allow me to re- 
spect his memory, I am bound to pardon it as I do my own 
faults, in consideration of the circumstances which mould 
the character of every human being. Could I meet him 
in some odd corner of the Elysian fields, where charity had 
room for both of us, I should first apologize to him for 
having been the instrument in the hand of events for at- 
tacking a fellow-creature, and then expect to hear him avow 
as heartily a regret for having injured myself, and unjustly 
treated his wife." 

Both Carlyle and Hawthorne speak of the sad con- 
trast between Hunt's nature and his ordinary sur- 
roundings. Having emphasized the neatness and 
propriety of Hunt's appearance whenever he went 
visiting, Carlyle writes further : 

"His Household, while in '4 Upper Cheyne Row,' within 
few steps of us here, almost at once disclosed itself to be 
huggermugger, wnthrift, and sordid collapse, once for all; 
and had to be associated with on cautious terms; — while he 
himself emerged out of it in the chivalrous figure I describe. 
Dark complexion (a trace of the African, I believe), copi- 
ous, clean, strong, black hair, beautifully-shaped, fine beam- 
ing serious hazel eyes ; seriousness and intellect the main 
expression of the face (to our surprise at first), — he would 
lean on his elbow against the mantel-piece (fine, clean, elas- 
tic figure too he had, five feet ten or more), and look round 
him nearly in silence, before taking leave for the night; 
as if I were a Lar, said he once, or permanent Household 
God here! (Such his polite Ariel-like way.) Another 
time, rising from this Lar attitude, he repeated (voice very 
fine) as if in sport of parody, yet with something of very 
sad perceptible: While I to sulphurous and penal fire — as 
the last thing before vanishing." 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 83 

And Hawthorne, after describing Hunt's sordid 
quarters, continues: 

"Leigh Hunt was born with such a faculty of enjoying 
all beautiful things that it seemed as if fortune did him as 
much wrong in not supplying them as in withholding a suf- 
ficiency of vital breath from ordinary men. . . . Leigh Hunt 
loved dearly to be praised. That is to say, he desired sym- 
pathy as a flower seeks sunshine, and perhaps profited by it 
as much in the richer depth of coloring that it imparted 
to his ideas. In response to all that we ventured to express 
about his writings (and, for my part, I went quite to the 
extent of my conscience, which was a long way, and there 
left the matter to a lady and a young girl, who happily 
were with me), his face shone, and he manifested great 
delight, with a perfect and yet delicate frankness for which 
I loved him. He could not tell us, he said, the happiness that 
such appreciation gave him; it always took him by surprise, 
he remarked, for — perhaps because he cleaned his own boots, 
and performed other little ordinary offices for himself — he 
never had been conscious of anything wonderful in his own 
person. And then he smiled, making himself and all the 
poor little parlor about him beautiful thereby. ... I wish 
that he could have had one full draught of prosperity be- 
fore he died. As a matter of artistic propriety, it would 
have been delightful to have seen him inhabiting a beautiful 
house of his own, in an Italian climate, with all sorts of 
elaborate upholstery and minute elegances about him, and a 
succession of tender and lovely women to praise his sweet 
poetry from morning to night." 

Enough has surely been said to enable the reader 
to distinguish the real Leigh Hunt in his writings. It 
is perhaps easy to dwell too long upon him, to appear 
to claim too much for him. It should be remembered, 
however, that he enjoyed the respect and the love of 



84 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

SO finical a creature as Carlyle, and that men like Lamb, 
Hazlitt, Hawthorne, and Lowell not only suffered but 
sought his friendship. Through his critical essays and 
the exuberant quotations in all his works, he popu- 
larized Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, And to have 
introduced Keats and Shelley to each other and to 
the world is to have deserved extraordinarily well of 
posterity. After all, however, we shall remember him 
longest for his simple, kindly presentation of homely 
facts and fancies. It is as Professor Winchester says : 

"... we could still select from Hunt's writing a goodly 
volume of essays hard to surpass in their kind. They are 
made up of trifles; but then life is made up of trifles. We 
need not withhold some cordial liking from that kind of 
literature which does not attempt to arouse or inspire, but 
rather to express the familiar pleasures that cheer, and 
the familiar trials that chasten the hours of every day. . . . 
He was not of the stuff that scorns delights and lives 
laborious days. He had solved no problems, inspired no 
heroisms, written no masterpieces. But he did something 
in early life for the cause of civil liberty; he did more, I 
think, in his later years to quicken and widen the love of 
good literature. And through all that half-century, by three 
generations of friends, he was known as a genial, cheery 
man, who never felt the tedium of life, was hopeful under 
all its discouragements, impatient of all harshness, fond of 
all gentle and beautiful things." 

THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859) 
Chronology 
1785 Born, August 15, at Manchester; son of a well-to- 
do merchant. 
1796 At Bath Grammar School. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 8s 

1801 To Manchester Grammar School Wrote and spoke 

Greek. No exercise, hard study, abuse, hver 
trouble, dosing. 

1802 Ran away. Journey through Wales to London; 

poverty, sufferings, Ann. 
1804 At Winchester College, Oxford. Began opium- 
eating— rheumatism or neuralgia. Admiration 
for Wordsworth and Coleridge. 

1807 Made acquaintance of Coleridge ; left Oxford with- 
out degree. 

1809 Leased cottage vacated by Wordsworth at Gras- 
mere; stomach disease; opium; inactivity; philo- 
sophical studies. 

1816 Married Margaret Simpson, farmer's daughter. 

1819 Edited Westmoreland Gazette, local newspaper. 

1821 Went to live in London; Confessions in London 
Magazine. 

1827 On Murder in Blackwood's. 1832, Klosterheim, a 

novel. 
1840 Moved to Lasswade, near Edinburgh. 
1844 Finally overcame opium habit. Logic of Pohtical 

Economy. 
1849 English Mail Coach in Blackzvood's. 
185 1-2 First collected edition of l^or^^r— America. 
1859 Died, December 8. Buried in West Churchyard, 

Edinburgh. 

"I have observed," says Addison, in the first num- 
ber of The spectator, "that a reader seldom peruses a 
book with pleasure, until he know whether the writer 
of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or choleric 
disposition, married or a batchelor, with other particu- 
lars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the 
right understanding of an author." And life and writ- 
ings of no author on our list are more closely bound 



86 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

up together than those of Thomas De Quincey. Even 
his most objective essays, such as Ow Murder and Joan 
of Arc, vividly reflect his temperament and his ex- 
periences; far the greater part of his work is frankly 
autobiographical. Living, in all its phases, and 
especially in its inner, intellectual manifestations, was 
fascinating business to De Quincey ; and books, articles 
— they were the means of sharing this fascination with 
others. 

Ingrained zest of living and feeling and knowing 
was probably never more essential to any man. With 
it he lived to a ripe age, and enlarged the record of 
man's proper and age-long study by rich accounts of 
the man De Quincey. Without the inborn zest of 
living, he would doubtless have found a place, while 
still a youth, in the Potter's Field. 

Glance at the vivid miniature painted by Carlyle: 

"One of the smallest man-figures I ever saw; shaped 
like a pair of tongs ; and hardly above five feet in all : when 
he sat, you would have taken him by candle-light for the 
beautifullest little child; blue-eyed, blonde-haired, sparkling 
face, — had there not been a something, too, which said, 
'Eccovi, this child has been in Hell !' " 

Diminutive in size, prococious in intellect, super- 
sensitive in temperament, his earliest recollections 
were those of deaths in the family — first his beloved 
sister's, then his father's. The next most poignant 
were of the cruelties inflicted by older, pugnacious 
brothers. An abused school-boy at sixteen, he ran 
away at seventeen, and wandered through Wales and 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 8? 

to London, often sleeping on open hillsides, seldom 
properly fed. London's welcome and hospitality to 
such a wanderer may be surmised. He found shelter 
in a house noteworthy for its hermit-like tenant, for 
the rats it harbored, and for the half-starved little 
girl who was its only housekeeper. He associated, 
in all the innocence of mutual misery and forlornity, 
with an outcast woman named Ann; she once saved 
his life by securing wine for him when he was faint 
with starvation; and it was the torture of his sub- 
conscious existence after better times had come for 
him that he was unable to find and reward her. 

While a young student at Oxford he began the 
practice of taking opium. The hardships he had 
undergone both as a schoolboy and as a wanderer in 
Wales and in London had resulted in a most acute 
and violent rheumatism or neuralgia. Later he was 
seized with an irritation of the stomach, since diag- 
nosed to have been a peculiar disease. In each case 
he resorted to opium and drank it in huge quantities; 
he later decreased his doses, then experimented with 
himself, then lapsed into excesses, finally fought and 
overcame the habit. 

He strove persistently against irregularities and 
weaknesses of other kinds — against financial improvi- 
dence and gullibility, against utter lack of method in 
study and composition. At his death he was paying 
rent on six sets of Edinburgh lodgings each of which 
he had occupied in turn until accumulated books, pa- 
pers, and manuscripts had crowded out of doors the 
author; he once went to call on a friend, and re- 



88 ' ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

mained in his house a year; he is said to have gone 
about Edinburgh with a five-pound note unused in 
his pocket, trying in vain to find some one to lend him 
a shining. 

Seventy- four years of pain and struggle and ec- 
centricity, fourteen volumes or so of writings — con- 
sisting chiefly of one hundred and fifty magazine 
articles, a total of several times that much written 
but never published — fit only, his mind being gone, 
to be carried from the six snowed-up apartments to 
the city bonfire : that is the exhibition we contemplate 
in the life and works of De Quincey. 

Why do we remember him? Why does every 
series of popular reprints include one or more volumes 
by him? Why do literary critics and historians omit- 
ting often every other author we have treated except 
Lamb, invariably treat at length of De Quincey? 

Well, it is not because of any divine or superhuman 
or inspiring message which he had to deliver. The 
element of warning contained in his Confessions of 
an English Opium-Eater is for many readers obscured 
by the pervading attractiveness of opium-eating there 
depicted. It would be hard to discover a single im- 
portant item added by De Quincey to the sum of 
human knowledge or the wealth of real human happi- 
ness. He devised no theory, no doctrine which would 
make more simple and intelligible the baffling com- 
plexity, the inchoateness of human experience. 

De Quincey, furthermore, would not be persistently 
remembered for his skill in the presentation of ideas. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 89 

This skill may attract for a time, but it soon becomes 
obvious that almost every one of his compositions in- 
cludes material that is superfluous, digressions that 
often obscure and that frequently do not entertain. 
His humor is seldom attractive; it is usually so 
forced and unnatural as to be almost vulgar. This 
quality sometimes approaches a playfulness which is 
not wholly displeasing, as in the following passage 
concerning Lamb: 

"Perhaps the collective wisdom of Europe could not have 
devised for Lamb a more favorable condition of toil than 
this very India House clerkship. His works (his Leaden- 
hall street works) were certainly not read; popular they 
could not be, for they were not read by anybody; but then, 
to balance that, they were not reviewed. . . . The list of 
errata again, committed by Lamb, was probably of a magni- 
tude to alarm any possible compositor; and yet these errata 
will probably never be known to mankind. They are dead 
and buried. . . . Then the returns, in a pecuniary sense, 
from these folios — how important were they ! It is not com- 
mon, certainly, to write folios ; but nfeither is it common to 
draw a steady income from 300 /. to 400 /. per annum from 
volumes of any size." 

Usually, however, his humor is of the sort indicated 
by the following extracts, each from his essay on the 
dignified subject of Style: 

"You, therefore, oh, reader! if personally cognisant of 
dumb-bells, we shall remind — if not, we shall inform — that 
it is a cylindrical bar of iron, issuing at each end in a globe 
of the same metal, and usually it is sheathed in green baize; 
but, perfidiously so, if that covering is meant to conceal the 



90 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

fact of those heart-rending thumps which it inflicts upon 
one's too confiding fingers every third ictus. . . . Now, 
reader, it is under this image of the dumb-bell we couch 
an allegory. Those globes at each end are the two systems 
or separate clusters of Greek literature; and that cylinder 
which connects them, is the long man that ran into each 
system — binding the two together. Who was that? It was 
Isocrates. Great we cannot call him in conscience; and, 
therefore, by way of compromise, we call him long, which, 
in one sense, he certainly was; for he lived through four-and- 
twenty Olympiads, each containing four solar years." 

"Who were they that next took up the literary use of 
prose? Confining our notice to people of celebrity, we may 
say that the house of Socrates (Domus Socratica is the ex- 
pression of Horace) were those who next attempted to popu- 
larise Greek prose; viz., the old gentleman himself, the 
founder of the concern, and his two apprentices, Plato and 
Xenophon." 

"These, unless parried, are knock-down blows to the Socra- 
tic, and therefore to the Platonic philosophy. . . . And all 
the German Tiedemanns and Tennemanns, the tedious men 
and the tenpenny-men, that have their twelve or their eigh- 
teen volumes viritim upon Plato, will find it hard to satisfy 
their readers, etc." 

If De Quincey's fame is unlikely, then, to be per- 
petuated either by his digressions or by his peculiar 
humor, so it is unlikely to be perpetuated by the gen- 
eral effect of his style. That style is invariably self- 
conscious; one can never forget that the most beauti- 
ful of the impassioned passages are composed. He 
writes not to relieve the burden upon his heart, not 
because he must, but to show what it is possible for 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 91 

man to do with words, to reveal his own peculiar capa- 
bilities. He is less a literary artist, less indeed a 
literary artisan, than a literary acrobat or prestidigi- 
tator. 

Still men honor and cherish him, and will con- 
tinue to do so. The fundamental reason for this 
seems to be that in De Quincey we perceive certain 
valuable human attributes developed to a stimulat- 
ing and inspiring degree. 

The first of these attributes is his vast knowledge. 
Science, philosophy, history of all countries, the litera- 
ture of all languages, the details and the working of 
the human machine, the face of nature, — of all these 
things he seems to know all. The passages quoted 
above, like any page from his writings, confirm this 
statement. 

Of course, this exhibition of knowledge is possible 
and natural because De Quincey had the industry 
to read and to observe widely, and a marvelous mem- 
ory for what he had read and seen. This is the second 
stimulating quality of De Quincey. He says : 

"Rarely do things perish from my memory that are worth 
remembering. Rubbish perishes instantly. Hence it happens 
that passages in Latin or English poets, which I never could 
have read but once (and that thirty years ago), often begin 
to blossom anew when I lie awake unable to sleep. I become 
a distinguished compositor in the darkness; and with my 
aerial composing-stick sometimes I 'set up' half a page of 
verses, which would be found tolerably correct if collated 
with the volume that I never had in my hand but once. I 
mention this in no spirit of boasting. Far from it; for, on 



92 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

the contrary, among my mortifications have been compli- 
ments to my memory, when, in fact, any compliments that 
I had merited were due to the higher faculty of an electric 
aptitude for seizing analogies, and by means of these aerial 
pontoons passing over like lightning from one topic to an- 
other." 

The third attribute, hinted at in the closing words 
of that passage, the third quality which inspires, is 
the richness, the abundance of his associations — using 
the word in the psychological sense. The vast knowl- 
edge stored in his marvelous memory is instantly 
available at the first suggestion. He sees some young 
people dancing an old-fashioned dance; and instantly 
all sorts of suggestions, cross-references, experiences, 
recollections, surmises, and dreams flow to his pen- 
point. His praise of Burke may be applied to him- 
self: 

"His great and peculiar distinction was that he viewed all 
objects of the understanding under more relations than other 
men, and under more complex relations. According to the 
multiplicity of these relations, a man is said to have a large 
understanding: according to their subtlety, a fine one; and 
in an angelic understanding, all things would appear to be 
related to all." 

He seldom repeats; each thread in the vast web of his 
mind seems to be attached to a different set of other 
threads. That richness of intellect, feebly counter- 
parted in the mind of each of us, is the birthright, we 
seem to feel, of every human being. De Quincey, we 
conclude, approximated the angelic, the ideal mind. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 93 

Knowledge, memory, richness of association: and 
with these stimulating qualities, place De Quincey's 
wonderful facility of expression. Three features of 
it impress one : its coherence, its figurativeness, and its 
melody. 

The coherence of his writing is no mere accidental 
attribute. He deliberately sought "sequaciousness," 
as he called it. These two passages indicate his ideal 
in this connection : 

"Take any sentence you please from Dr. Johnson, suppose, 
and it will be found to contain a thought — good or bad — 
fully preconceived. Whereas, in Burke, whatever may have 
been the preconception, it receives a new determination or 
inflexion at every clause of the sentence. Some collateral 
adjunct of the main proposition, some temperament or re- 
straint, some oblique glance at its remote affinities, will in- 
variably be found to attend the progress of his sentences — 
like the spray from a waterfall, or the scintillations from the 
iron under the blacksmith's hammer." 

"Every man, as he walks through the streets, may con- 
trive to jot down an independent thought: a shorthand memo- 
randum of a great truth. . . . Standing on one leg you may 
accomplish this. The labor of composition begins when 
you have to put your separate threads of thought into a loom ; 
to weave them into a continuous whole; to connect, to intro- 
duce them; to blow them out or expand them; to carry them 
to a close." 

As for the figurativeness and the melody of his 
style, little comment is necessary ; in reading you can- 
not miss either. Both qualities contribute to the 
effectiveness of his "impassioned prose," that near- 



94 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

poetry yet non-poetical kind of writing which he 
affected. He thought himself the virtual inventor 
of this form; he surely stands alone with Ruskin at 
the head of its exponents. 

Such, we may conclude, is the basis of our per- 
sistent admiration for De Quincey. The great writer, 
the ne plus ultra in literature, when he appears, we 
may conclude further, will possess these qualities 
which so distinguish De Quincey. He will possess 
along with a message, along with clarity, sound 
humor, and sturdy naturalness, none of which were 
De Ouincey's, these qualities of vast knowledge al- 
ways ready to hand through memory and association, 
and of surpassing facility of expression. It is hard 
to see how any writer can possess these last inspiring 
attributes in a greater measure than De Quincey him- 
self possessed them. 

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) 
Chronology 

1795 Born, December 5, at Ecclefechan, Scotland. 

1805 To school at Annan. 

1809 To Edinburgh University to prepare for the min- 
istry. 

1814-1818 Tutor; Annan, Kirkcaldy. Decided not to be- 
come a minister. 

1818 To Edinburgh to study law. Tutoring, reading, 
suffering. 

1821 "Conversion," in Leith Walk, Edinburgh. Deter- 
mined to v^^rite for a living. 

1824 Life of Schiller; translation of Goethe's Wilhelm 
Meister. 

1826 Married Jane Baillie Welsh. Other translations. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 95 

1828-1834 At Craigenputtock. Magazine articles; pov- 
erty; work on Sartor; visit to London. Sartor 
Resartus in Eraser's Magazine. 

1834-1881 At 5 Cheyne Row^, Chelsea (near London). 
Friends — J. S. Mill, Leigh Hunt, Tennyson, Dick- 
ens, Thackeray, Froude, Ruskin, Emerson. 

1857 French Revolution, Other magazine articles. Lec- 
tures. 

1839 Chartism; 1841, Heroes and Hero-Worship; 1843, 
Past and Present; 1845, Letters and Speeches of 
Oliver Cromwell; 1849, Nigger Question; 1850, 
Latter-Day Pamphlets; 1851, Life of John Sterl- 
ing; 1858-1865, Frederick the Great. 

1866 Address as rector of Edinburgh University, April 2. 
Death of Mrs. Carlyle. 

1874 Prussian Order of Merit. Offered honors by Dis- 
raeli, Prime Minister. 

1881 Death, February 4. Buried at Ecclefechan. 

What is the real condition of England during the 
part of the nineteenth century we have been con- 
templating? In order to be more definite, what was" 
its condition, let us say, between 1820 and 1830 — 
the decade which saw produced the Elia Essays, most 
of Hazlitt's Table Talk, Bracehridge Hall, and those 
charming trifles about pigs and six fat persons in one 
coach and cold razors and tears for the dead, the joys 
of opium, of coaching, of dreaming, of being De 
Quincey? Do these productions — they constitute the 
best non-fiction prose writing of the decade — does 
this sort of reading fairly reflect the condition and the 
interests of the English nation? 

Let a few sharp lines sketch an answer. On many 
a night during this decade, we are assured, one of 



96 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

the vehicles which scuttled out of the way of the 
Manchester and Glasgow Royal Mail was a sorry 
affair, loaded to the breaking-point with live stock — 
two-legged live stock : London foundlings, poor or- 
phans, being disposed of under contract to employers 
of labor in northern factories. Last year the poor 
of Brunswick, Maine, cost the town about sixty cents 
per inhabitant; the usual expenditure in New Eng- 
land is about one dollar per inhabitant; in England 
during this early decade, the expenditure was twice 
as great as it is now in England, three times as great 
as in New England to-day, five times as great as it 
was in Brunswick last year. And these figures make 
no allowance for the change in the value of money 
since that time. A few years before 1820 child labor 
had become such a fearful abuse that restrictive meas- 
ures had to be passed ; and during this decade the law 
forbade employers to keep children at work more 
than — ^twelve hours a day! 

What of all this do we find reflected in the writings 
of the early nineteenth-century essayists? Are such 
things out of the sphere of the man of letters? 
Chaucer could write literature for posterity and by the 
same lines open men's eyes to the clerical and social 
abuses of his time; Shakespeare satisfied the Globe 
groundlings and also developed new and high moral 
and artistic standards. Milton recorded his sublime 
visions and in mighty fashion flayed reactionaries and 
instilled religion as well. The greatest men of letters 
may be said to have found their chief inspiration in 
the interests and problems that concerned and racked 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 97 

their contemporaries. Pleasant, genial, fascinating, 
the men we have studied are; we reserve terms of 
greater approbation for the man who fascinates even 
while he wrestles with the ills of the world around 
him. 

Carlyle so wrestled. In 1830, the last year of our 
chosen decade, he was but little known. By 1848 his 
circle of influence was wide. It was in that year that 
a rich young man, a man interested in all the con- 
ventional forms of literary expression and having a 
marvelous gift for expressing the many things which 
he found significant in art, John Ruskin by name, de- 
liberately turned his attention to social conditions. He 
had read Carlyle. "It is no time for the idleness of 
metaphysics or the entertainment of the arts," he said. 
He became the most advanced, the most vigorous, and 
the most effective of England's social reformers — 
continuing at the same time to be one of her most 
noteworthy essayists. American Emerson, who had 
been stirred with sympathy when he read Carlyle's 
earliest writings, wrote of Carlyle in this same year 
of 1848: "He thinks it [the bad times, the social dis- 
content] the only question for wise men, instead of 
arts and fine fancies and poetry and such things, to 
address themselves to the problems of society. This 
confusion is the inevitable end of such falsehoods 
and nonsense as they have been embroiled with." 

There is a familiar sound to us in this "problem 
of society" : we shall never be beyond the circle of 
that sound during the rest of the century. The actual 
tones of Carlyle may not ring among us still; but 



98 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

sympathetic vibrations awakened by those tones tin- 
tinnabulate mightily in English-speaking countries to- 
day. 

Carlyle's development previous to the decade we 
have chosen as a center, need not detain us long. 
His experiences within that decade and during the few 
years immediately succeeding it contain more that is 
of significance. And briefly again we shall glance 
at his later years. 

To James Carlyle, staunch, able stone-mason, sternly 
religious, was born in small, retired Ecclefechan in 
southern Scotland, on December 5, 1795, a son — • 
Thomas Carlyle. James Carlyle had wrung from 
the world an honest but simple living, had built in his 
thorough fashion the house which sheltered his wife 
and child, was and remained beholden to no one. 

Thomas learned reading from his mother, arith- 
metic from his father, and other things at the village 
school and in the study of the village minister. At 
length, in 1805, he began to learn still other things 
at the grammar school at Annan, a town south of 
Ecclefechan. He was quick at learning — a bright boy. 
Like every bright Scotch church-member's son, he 
must to the University at Edinburgh and become 
a minister. And though Edinburgh was far and 
coach fares were high, his pockets would hold sev- 
eral days' supply of oat-bread, and his legs were 
strong : he walked the one hundred miles, and entered 
the University, in 1809. He studied, after his own 
fashion doubtless, through the four years. He had 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 99 

friends ; yet we should hardly have called him a "good 
mixer," for he was nicknamed "Dean Jonathan," 
and the first Dean Jonathan (Swift) "mixed" as a 
pickle does with candy. 

His degree at length secured, with honors, it seems, 
in mathematics, he had to suppKDrt himself while he 
studied further. He studied, endured the grind, and 
saved money as a tutor or under-teacher in mathe- 
matics, first in his old school at Annan, later at an- 
other school; meanwhile he complied with the church 
regulations by preaching two sermons. A girl at- 
tracted him, how strongly one may see if he reads 
of Blumine in Sartor Resartus. He read, studied, 
and thought too much: he found that he could no 
longer conscientiously subscribe to the doctrines of his 
father's church. He had the courage to tell his father 
so at once. And his father had the wisdom which, 
in spite of cherished hopes, could understand and 
approve. Consequently Carlyle foreswore the minis- 
try as his calling in life. 

Sick of teaching, wrenched by his decision, deter- 
mined somehow to win his way, he went again to 
Edinburgh to study law. The move was bold, and, 
as it proved, unwise; for inborn tastes and aversions 
quickly did for the law as conscience had done for 
the ministry. What to do? He had long been tor- 
tured by dyspepsia; there was only a bare living in 
the odd jobs of tutoring available; the bitter miseries 
of the ignorant and the poor leered at him every- 
where; the religion, the life-scheme which he had 
abandoned, had given way to mere emptiness and un- 



100 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

certainty. He thought, as youth and bravery and 
sensitiveness combined have often thought, of suicide. 

We have reached the first year of our central dec- 
ade. The Elia Essays are appearing in London; 
Hazlitt is in the thick of some glorious quarrels; 
Irving is studying Master Simon at Bracebridge Hall, 
Hunt the mysterious art of pig-driving, and De 
Ouincey that vast collection of crude literary ma- 
terial — ^himself. It is the year, too, when fierce opium 
pains, involuntarily induced, are racking a hideous 
fraction of England's people: every parish has its 
crowd of under-fed, broken-spirited paupers; those 
wagons, stuck full of gaunt children, rumble north- 
ward ; probably more than one employer still disre- 
gards that new law limiting the daily toil of an eight- 
year-old child to twelve hours. 

It is June 21, 1821, a hot day. Thomas Carlyle is 
walking out the crowded street which leads to Leith, 
the seaport of Edinburgh. He is not musing upon 
Hunt's year-old essay on A Now. Of a Hot Day. 
All the burdens of philosophical and religious un- 
certainty, all the injustices and sufferings of man- 
kind seem to press upon his shoulders; he is deep 
in his habitual and weary wrestling with facts and 
fate. Truth and power seem to lie wholly on the 
side of sufifering and evil and uselessness. 

All at once he feels illuminated, strong: it rings 
in his soul that as for himself he need not, will not 
surrender to these deadening thoughts ; he will believe, 
he will be, he will do! He calls it his new birth. He 
thus describes its immediate effect: 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS loi 

"Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was 
changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow, but Indignation and 
grim fire-eyed Defiance. 

"Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively 
through all the recesses of my Me; and then was it that 
my whole Me stood up, in naked, God-created majesty, and 
with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most 
important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation 
and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly 
called. The Everlasting No had said: 'Behold, thou art 
fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil's)'; 
to which my whole Me now made answer : T am not thine, 
but Free, and forever hate thee !' " 

And the fearful, cheerful struggle of our decade began. 
He had determined to do with his might what lay 
in him. He said to himself : 

"Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. 
Produce ! Produce ! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal 
fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name ! 'Tis the 
utmost thou hast in thee : out with it, then. Up ! up ! What- 
soever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. 
Work while it is called To-day; for the Night cometh, 
wherein no man can work." 

He had long felt that there lay in him, Thomas 
Carlyle, ideas worth expressing, and the power to 
write. He now became more and more convinced 
that he could help solve this riddle of a world with 
his ideas and his writing. True, two articles already 
sent to magazines had attained the publicity of the 
waste-basket. But the German literature, especially 
the works of Schiller and Goethe, which he had been 



I02 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

reading, and which was known to few EngHsh people, 
seemed to provide a literary opportunity. 

Sustenance and encouragement both came. A friend 
had him appointed tutor in a rich and genteel family; 
it was exasperating work for so independent a soul 
as Carlyle, but the two hundred pounds a year were 
worth some pain. And he met Jane Baillie Welsh, 
a gifted and sprightly girl; correspondence with her 
brought sympathy and inspiration. At last the London 
Magazine, its back numbers doubtless still in de- 
mand for certain essays signed Elia and some lurid 
Confessions of an Opium-Eater, took Carlyle's Life 
of Schiller (1823-4). An Edinburgh publisher soon 
took his translation of Goethe's William Meister 
(1824). He visited Paris with his patrons and his 
pupils; also London, and met there many men of 
letters — Gifford and others like him, probably, also 
Lamb and Hunt and Hazlitt. They seemed to him 
mere triflers (he did not know Lamb's real story) ; 
he called them "things for writing articles." Dyspep- 
sia, patronage, the turmoil of ideas within him, the 
unresponsiveness of publishers and people, still bayed 
at him — life was still hard. But renewed hope was at 
hand: for Goethe wrote a grateful acknowledgment 
of the Meister translation. 

No more of this hateful tutoring, he said at last. 
Living on his savings he translated and published 
German Romances, and on the slender proceeds he 
married Jane Welsh and settled in Edinburgh. First 
a review of a life of Jean Paul Richter, then other 
articles were accepted by the Edinburgh Review and 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 103 

other magazines. All this was something; but it was 
slow, slow, and unremunerative, Mrs. Carlyle owned 
a farm, Craigenputtock, back in the hills beyond 
Dumfries. Living, they concluded, would be cheaper 
there and noises less numerous. In 1828 they moved 
to it. 

Here Carlyle prepared more articles. Publishers 
would have welcomed them if prepared or modified 
according to their suggestions, their plans. But that 
was not Carlyle's way; he would not compromise in 
matter or in manner. Nor was writing in the ordinary 
sense pleasurable to him ; he did not write buoyantly 
and rapidly, with the pen of a ready writer. Hunt 
or Hazlitt would have struck off enough to supply the 
printer for months while Carlyle labored upon a single 
essay; each article, he says, was "a slow product of 
a kind of mental agony." 

And as this decade of ours rounded out, he was com- 
pleting (the mental agony at its height, we may be 
sure) a stupendous work which expressed his now 
crystallized ideas and theories as no brief magazine 
articles could express them. He was so certain of its 
worth that in person he took it up to the London 
publishers. But no one would buy. Some did give 
him commissions for more conventional articles, and 
he sadly returned to Scotland to execute them. At 
length, in 1833, Fraser's Magazine, a liberal and al- 
most anarchical publication of that day, with a really 
pitiful recompense to the author for his pains, began 
to issue the great essay serially; and Sartor Resartiis 
dribbled into the world. 



104 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

It met with no gentle indifference. Subscriber after 
subscriber to that confessedly eccentric magazine 
begged the editor to use for something valuable the 
space occupied by this crazy series. Just two readers 
expressed approval : one was a Catholic priest in Ire- 
land; the other was Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

The leaven had begun to work. The ideas which 
were to mold John Ruskin's life were now expressed. 
The sympathetic vibrations which still resound were 
being awakened; for the teachings promulgated by 
Carlyle in his later life were all contained in brief or 
in embryo in the early periodical essays and in Sartor. 

We may quickly chronicle the remaining events of 
his life. Conversations with John Stuart Mill in 
London had turned his thoughts to the French Revolu- 
tion as a literary topic. London was the place to work 
upon that. So to London, that is, to the suburb of 
Chelsea, the Carlyles went, bag and baggage, "burn- 
ing," as Carlyle said, "the Craigenputtock bridges be- 
hind them." For three years he struggled with the 
vast and greatly misunderstood phenomenon he had 
undertaken to interpret. The destruction of the manu- 
script of the first volume just after its completion is 
one of the tragedies of English literature. The French 
Revolution appeared in 1837. It promptly made 
Carlyle famous. He was asked to give lectures on 
that and on other subjects. In 1840 came the last 
series of lectures, expanding a thought contained in 
Sartor Resartus, a series entitled On Heroes and 
Hero-Worship. Chartism (1839), Past and Present 
(1843), The Nigger Question (1849), and Latter- 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 105 

Day Pamphlets (1850) made applications of his 
fundamental beliefs to current problems. Cromwell's 
Letters and Speeches (1845) ^^^ Frederick the Great 
(1857-1865) were studies of great heroes each of 
whom he had long worshiped. Each was produced 
after fearful struggles and suffering. Emerson called 
Frederick (five volumes) "the wittiest book ever 
written," and such is its completeness and accuracy 
that German military students used it as a text con- 
cerning Frederick's battles. 

The influence of his writings is illustrated by the 
fact that the great statue of Cromwell near the Houses 
of Parliament in London was erected soon after Car- 
lyle had proved the Protector a protector indeed, and 
not the would-be destroyer of Great Britain. Men 
often, usually, disagreed with his conclusions and de- 
tested his manner and attitude; but he made men 
think; he spoke, as Emerson said, "with an emphasis 
that hindered from sleep"; as Professor Bliss Perry 
says, Carlyle put and puts iron into men's blood. 

With the completion of Frederick, Carlyle prac- 
tically ended his work. Many honors and sorrows 
were yet to come. The signal honor of his life came 
in 1865 when he was chosen to the very honorable 
office of Rector of Edinburgh University. His in- 
augural address, delivered April 2, 1866, is considered 
the ripest and most confident expression of his doc- 
trines which he ever produced. The great sorrow 
was the death of his wife. Mrs. Carlyle, long a 
confirmed invalid, had remained behind in London 
when Carlyle went to Edinburgh to deliver his in- 



io6 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

augural, and Carlyle now visited friends in Scotland. 
One day the news sped northward to him that Mrs. 
Carlyle was dead. Her coachman, turning to her for 
orders as he was driving her about the city, had 
found her upright but lifeless. 

Carlyle was never his real self again. People who 
have read only Froude's misleading account of Car- 
lyle's treatment of his wife, should read also the 
section of Carlyle's Reminiscences devoted to her. If 
he had shown her neglect, he had also shown her love 
and devotion ; and for his neglect, he suffered in those 
later years as few souls are sensitive enough to suffer. 

By 1870, Carlyle was the acknowledged head of 
English letters. In 1874 he was given the Prussian 
Order of Merit, and the same year he declined Dis- 
raeli's delicate offer of the Grand Cross of Bath and 
a generous pension. 

Two years after Mrs. Carlyle's death he had been 
compelled to give up horseback riding, the only recrea- 
tion in which he had all his life found mental rel?ef. 
By 1872, he was no longer able to use his right hand 
in writing. His close friends, Ruskin, Froude, and 
Emerson, did much to lighten his last days. And on 
February 4, 1 881, he died. The Dean of Westminster 
Abbey offered a tomb there; but in accordance with 
Carlyle's known wishes this offer was declined, and 
on a grim, snowy day, he was buried among the 
graves of his peasant kindred in the little churchyard 
at Ecclefechan. 

What he accomplished we cannot yet estimate. The 
ripples he set in motion still follow one another over 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 107 

the surface of our life. But people In general seem 
to be thinking in a fashion less and less feeble, and 
the man of letters with no message has more and more 
difficulty in selling his works ; and though the poor and 
the miserable in body and in soul are yet with us, 
foundlings are in few places farmed out to labor 
twelve hours a day with the public viewing the spec- 
tacle complacently — as they seem to have viewed it 
in 1820. 

It should not be understood that Carlyle was what 
is called a practical reformer. Howard had secured a 
measure of prison reform, Wilber force had freed all 
slaves on English soil, Dickens was soon to be improv- 
ing school and workhouse and slum conditions, and 
Ruskin at length would be exhausting his patrimony 
in an effort to develop various neglected phases of 
English civilization. Carlyle's function among these 
men, as well as among thinkers and workers in nearly 
all branches of human activity, was for the most 
part that of a philosopher, a seer, a discoverer and 
expounder of fundamentals, of those dynamic con- 
ceptions upon which true and permanent reforms must 
be based. 

His inheritance and his early training, together 
with natural gifts which no theory of heredity or 
environment can adequately account for, constituted 
the soil. His observation and his wide German read- 
ing^ seem to have furnished the seed. And the re- 

* His philosophy is largely that of Fichte ; his style reflects 
Richter. 



io8 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

suiting growth represented by his writings is perennial 
and pervading rather than annual and immediate in 
its significance. 

His writings as a whole possess a singular unity; 
there is oneness, insistency to his message. Hinted, 
partially proclaimed in his earlier essays, pointedly 
and vigorously expressed in Sartor Resartus, it re- 
sounds in one form or another in each of his later 
works. The reader of Carlyle's essays, few or many, 
should have in mind a definite conception of this 
"message" of Carlyle's, of this unity of his writing 
as a whole. 

Above all else Carlyle insists upon looking beyond 
the Apparent to the Real. Clothes, he reiterates, 
must not be mistaken for the Man; forms, — in gov- 
ernment, in ecclesiastical matters, in the intellectual 
fields of history and science — must be distinguished 
from the essence — the State, Religion, God. 

In looking beyond the Apparent, Carlyle thought he 
saw one great neglected fact concerning mankind. 
It was the reverence which men universally exhibit 
for Heroes, for those God-given, God-endowed spirits 
whom to discover and to follow, he considered, is the 
chief business of all other men. This fact he found 
dominant in all past history as well as in sore con- 
temporary needs. 

Yet another important fact he thought significant of 
his time — the power exerted by the press and by men 
of letters. He spoke of letters as constituting a virtual 
religion, with something of a liturgy of its own, and 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 109 

with priests in its able and conscientious writers. Upon 
heroes, in great measure upon heroic men of letters, 
he felt, depended the salvation of mankind from the 
forces so insistently working its destruction. 

This was a bold, an awakening declaration. As 
pronounced by Carlyle it compelled attention. It op- 
posed complacency and tacit unthinking acceptance on 
every side, and consequently brought upon Carlyle not 
only opposition but ridicule and even hatred. It de- 
termined his own career and the nature of his writings. 
It led him to make and to present studies of heroes; 
concerning two of the characters he treated, Mahomet 
and Cromwell, he is acknowledged to have reversed 
the accepted view, for neither has since been regarded 
as a dupe. 

Carlyle's fundamental conceptions led him also to 
discredit numerous practical and popular reforms: 
the extension of suffrage, the American "experiments" 
in democracy, even the amelioration of prison con- 
ditions and the emancipation of slaves. Carlyle was 
led not so much to deny the need and the advantage 
of these changes as to emphasize their utter inadequacy 
for purposes of ultimate reform. 

Carlyle's specific teachings have not been accepted. 
Little, moreover, of the destruction that Carlyle fore- 
told as the penalty for their non-acceptance, has yet 
come to pass. Much has occurred to indicate, on the 
contrary, that he was probably wrong in many of the 
applications of his doctrines to practical affairs. Yet 
there is perhaps not one of his dicta which can be 
said to be disproved. And his great principle, the 



no ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

keynote of his message, the need of looking ever be- 
yond the apparent to the real, is one which the world 
cannot safely forget, and one which it should ever 
honor Carlyle for proclaiming. 

It is obvious that the essays of Carlyle are far from 
identical in nature with those of the first essayist, 
Montaigne. The spirit of Carlyle obviously would 
not suffer the placing of chief emphasis upon "house 
and barns . . . father . . . wife . . . tenants 
. . . old lean bald pate . . . knives and forks, 
etc." It would be difficult to construct any of these 
features of Carlyle's experience from what he writes 
in his essays. There is but one element of marked 
similarity between them — their sincerity and inde- 
pendence. Whereas these qualities made Montaigne 
refuse to generalize and prophesy, they induced Car- 
lyle to do that and nothing else. 

Consequently in reading Montaigne one thinks 
primarily of Montaigne, incidentally of the subject 
discussed ; in reading Carlyle one thinks for the most 
part incidentally of Carlyle, primarily of the subject 
discussed. The essay in his hands became consist- 
ently what it had been intermittently among eight- 
eenth-century essayists — objective. 

One species of the objective essay was developed 
masterfully by Carlyle and his contemp>oraries. This 
was the so-called book review. Book reviews had ap- 
peared steadily in English periodicals ever since the 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS m 

first number of Works of the Learned^ in 1681. 
Eighteenth-century reviews, for the most part the 
work of hack-writers, had often, strange to say, 
aroused great attention and had developed bitter ani- 
mosity and recrimination. Very few of the reviews 
previous to the nineteenth century, however, had any 
permanent literary significance. 

In 1802, the first number of the Edinburgh Review 
appeared. This magazine included book reviews pre- 
pared after a new and better fashion. The founders, 
Francis Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, and Lord Brougham, 
had determined that their contributors should not be 
mere hacks; they were to be well paid, and to be 
selected for their real knowledge of the subject-matter 
treated in the book or books reviewed. 

Numerous memorable essays have been the result. 
Each is less a minute consideration of a given book 
than a disquisition of independent and permanent 
value on the subject represented by the book. The 
book suggested to the author of the review an objective 
essay of his own. 

Carlyle's miscellaneous essays, many of them, are 
of this sort. Even Sartor Resartus is ostensibly a 
lengthy review of a (fictitious) German work. Ma- 
caulay's fame as an essayist depends almost wholly 
upon book reviews of the Edinburgh Review type. 

This species of objective essay quite naturally led 
to the wide production of essays not even ostensibly 
book reviews, but dealing with events or ideas re- 

* An imitation of the Journal des savants, first published in 
France in 1665. 



112 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

garded by the writer as significant. Independent treat- 
ments, not comprehensive, usually discursive, dis- 
tinct from romance and poetry and from utilitarian 
writing, were the result. The essays of Emerson, of 
Cardinal Newman, and of Lowell are examples. 

Of course it is not alone the brevity, the discursive- 
ness, the non-utilitarian quality of these writings which 
entitles them to be classed as essays. There is in 
each still a subjective element. Carlyle and Macaulay 
and Newman, though not the main objects of interest 
in any, are nevertheless severally present and observ- 
able in each essay. Though no longer "painted" in his 
essays, the writer may be said to be silhouetted there. 
The objective essay is thus not wholly distinct from the 
subjective; Montaigne and Emerson are justly classed 
together as essayists. 

With this conception of the objective essay and its 
relation to the subjective, the reader is prepared to 
peruse intelligently the essays of Carlyle and of the 
"objective" essayists who followed him, 

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-1859) 
Chronology 
1800 Born, October 25, at Rothley Temple, Leicester- 
shire. Precocity; memory; writing. 
1818 To Trinity College, Cambridge. Speeches at 
Union. Prizes. 

1824 Student at Gray's Inn. Speech, anti-slavery meet- 

ing. 

1825 Milton essay in Edinburgh Review. 

1826 Admitted to bar. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 113 

1830 Elected to Parliament. Speeches on removal of 
Jewish disabilities, Reform Bill, etc. 

1833-1838 Member of supreme council of India. Aid 
in founding educational system, criminal code, 
etc. Active in Parliament on return to England ; 
writing. 

1842 Lays of Ancient Rome. 1843, Collected Essays. 

1848-1855 History of England (4 volumes; incomplete). 

1849 Lord Rector of University of Glasgow. 

1857 Made Baron Macaulay of Rothley. 

1859 Death at home in Kensington. Buried at foot of 
Addison's statue in Westminster Abbey. 

Macaulay is the only important nineteenth century 
essayist who consistently participated in public affairs, 
and the only one who is buried in Westminster Abbey. 
The distinction which he attained in Parliamentary 
and Cabinet positions seemed to come with very little 
effort on his part. And the honor of a tomb in the 
great Abbey, although offered in the face of opposi- 
tion in the case of Carlyle and in that of Ruskin, was 
universally accepted as the meed of this popular essay- 
ist, orator, poet, historian, and publicist. Son of a 
comparatively obscure government official, he had be- 
come at twenty-five years of age an able essayist, at 
thirty years a speaker and legislator of mark, at 
forty-two a popular poet, at forty-eight a distinguished 
historian, at fifty-seven a peer of the realm heaped 
with honors and acclaimed with gratitude and admira- 
tion wherever he went, whenever he spoke. Surely a 
brilliant career. 

Zachary Macaulay, the father of Thomas Babing- 
ton Macaulay, had been a clerk in a plantation in the 



114 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

West Indies, later the virtual governor of the negro 
colony of Sierra Leone in Africa; and at the time of 
Macaulay's birth, on October 25, 1800, was in Eng- 
land as secretary of the company in charge of Sierra 
Leone colony. He later became prominent in the 
movement to free all the slaves in the British Empire. 
He was an active, ardent, well-informed man, with 
literary tastes but no marked literary ability. 

The versatility and zeal of the father descended in 
increased measure upon Macaulay. At three he read 
incessantly. It was an unusual and a bookish child 
which spoke the things recorded of him. He was 
not yet five years old, it is said, when after a servant 
had spilled some hot coffee over his legs he said in 
reply to his hostess's tender inquiry : "Thank you, 
madam, the agony is abated." At about the same age, 
a housemaid threw away as rubbish some shells with 
which the child Macaulay had marked out a plot of 
ground behind the house; when Macaulay found it 
out, he rushed into the drawing-room and said 
solemnly to those present: "Cursed be Sally; for it 
is written. Cursed is he that removeth his neighbor's 
landmark." At seven years of age he composed a 
compendium of universal history. Scott's Lay of the 
Last Minstrel and Marmion he promptly had by 
heart. In later life he reproduced obscure verses 
which he had seen but once as a boy ; he felt confident 
that if all the copies of Pilgrim's Progress and Para- 
dise Lost should disappear, he could reproduce them 
in toto. All this early display of marvelous ability 
seems not to have interfered with his boyish enjoy- 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 115 

ment of life; and his parents never undeceived him in 
thinking that all boys had such powers. It is little 
wonder that at school, which he began to attend in 
1812, and later (after 18 18) at Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, he won honors and prizes of all sorts. 

His fellowship at Trinity (1824), and his admis- 
sion to the bar after a period of study at Gray's Inn, 
in 1826, are events of little importance to us. That he 
spoke in mature and praiseworthy fashion at an Anti- 
Slavery Society meeting in 1824 is of greater impor- 
tance. And the acceptance of his essay on Milton by 
Jeffrey for the Edinburgh Review in 1825 is signifi- 
cant as a leap into publicity and honored prominence. 

Notable speeches were given by him at frequent in- 
tervals from the time when he was first elected to 
Parliament in 1830 until he finally retired from it in 
1857. The political and legislative activity which 
these speeches indicate did not, however, prevent him 
from producing thirty-seven scholarly and altogether 
notable essays between 1825 and 1845, his famous 
Lays of Ancient Rome in 1842, and five volumes of 
his History of England between 1848 and the time 
of his death. Enough is indicated concerning his popu- 
larity as an author by the fact that his Lays and his 
History sold as widely as the poems of Byron and 
Scott and the novels of Scott and Dickens. 

He held important offices in England. He also 
held office in India where he helped found the educa- 
tional system of the Indian Empire, and where a code 
of criminal law and criminal procedure prepared by 
him in 1837 was later adopted. This last is all the 



ii6 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

more remarkable because as a lawyer he had con- 
ducted but a single, insignificant case. On the voyage 
home from India, characteristically enough, in 1838, 
he learned German. 

In politics a Whig, he favored the Reform Bill 
(1831), the repeal of the Corn Laws (1845), ^^^ ^ 
bill for limiting the labor of young persons in factories 
to ten hours a day (1846) ; but he opposed the ex- 
tension of copyright privileges to sixty years (1841} 
and the People's Charter (1842). Early in his career, 
his inflexibly independent principles kept him from 
remunerative offices, and on one occasion he sold his 
University medals to raise money for current expenses 
(1831). He went down to defeat at an election in 
Edinburgh rather than give pledges to the voters as 
to his legislative conduct. His vast success in public 
life, in other words, seems never to have been attained 
at the sacrifice of a single principle or scruple. 

Macaulay's method of composition is indicated by 
the following quotation from Trevelyan's Life: 

"As soon as he had got into his head all the informa- 
tion relating to any particular episode in his History (such, 
for instance, as Argyle's expedition to Scotland, or the at- 
tainder of Sir John Fenwick, or the calling in of the dipt 
coinage), he would sit down and write off the whole story 
at a headlong pace; sketching the outlines under the genial 
and audacious impulse of a first conception ; and securing in 
black and white each idea, and epithet, and turn of phrase, 
as it flowed straight from his busy brain to his rapid fingers. 
. . . except when at his best, he never would work at all. 

" 'I had no heart to write,' he says in his journal of March 
6, 1831. 'I am too self-indulgent in this matter, it may be: 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS n? 

and yet I attribute much of the success which I have had 
to my habit of writing only when I am in the humor, and 
of stopping as soon as the thoughts and words cease to flow 
fast. There are, therefore, few lees in my wine. It is all 
the cream of the bottle.' " 

While still but a middle-aged man he was seized with 
heart trouble. And on December 28, 1859, a sudden 
attack came as he sat in his library chair with the first 
number of Thackeray's Cornhill Magazine open on his 
lap; so his relatives found him, dead. 

The success and versatility of this man in life, 
the wide sale of his works even to this day, are weighty 
claims upon our attention and respect. He was truly 
and highly interesting, fascinating, and admirable. 
Why may we not class him among the greatest of 
nineteenth-century essayists ? 

Primarily, it may be maintained, because though not 
untruthful, he lacked that highest passion for truth 
which dominates the greatest men. With him effec- 
tiveness — secured through charming presentation, 
through disregard of what seemed to be non-essentials, 
through stressing and suppressing just a little here and 
there — effectiveness tends to supplant faithfulness to 
facts. One cannot fancy him, supposing that people 
had disapproved of that early Milton essay, persisting, 
as Carlyle did, in writing what and after what fashion 
he felt inwardly impelled to write : he would have 
changed subject and style just a little. He disre- 
garded, or else never saw at all, those features of his 
vision which would go down hard with people in gen- 



ii8 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

eral. He made a hero out of no villain, as Carlyle 
did with Cromwell; on the contrary, he rather justi- 
fied the prevailing and somewhat mistaken attitude 
toward James II and the English Revolutionists. 

Mr. Frederic Harrison points out a striking example 
of these fundamental weaknesses of Macaulay; it is 
the passage from his essay on Von Ranke's History 
of the Popes describing the venerability of the Papacy 
as an institution. The extent of its dominions and the 
comparative ephemeralness of other human institutions 
are dwelt upon by Macaulay in a paragraph beginning 
and ending with these words : 

"There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work 
of human policy so well deserving of examination as the 
Roman Catholic Church, . . . And she may still exist in 
undiminished vigor when some traveller from New Zealand 
shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a 
broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. 
Paul's." 

After dwelling upon the force, the surpassing 
literary beauty and effectiveness of the passage, Mr. 
Harrison turns to the successive comparisons instituted 
by Macaulay and says : 

"The passage, though a truism to all thoughtful men, 
was a striking novelty to English Protestants fifty years ago. 
But it will hardly bear a close scrutiny of these sweeping, 
sharp-edged, 'cock-sure' dogmas of which it is composed. 
The exact propositions it contains may be singly accurate; 
but as to the most enduring 'work of human policy,' it is fair 
to remember the Civil Law of Rome has a continuous history 
of at least twenty- four centuries; that the Roman Empire 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 119 

from Augustus to the last Constantine in New Rome en- 
dured for fifteen centuries; and from Augustus to the last 
Hapsburg it endured for eighteen centuries. There is a 
certain ambiguity between the way in which Macaulay alter- 
nates between the Papacy and the Christian Church, which 
are not at all the same thing. The Papacy, as a European or 
cosmical institution, can hardly be said to have more than 
twelve centuries of continuous history on the stage of the 
world. The religious institutions of Confucius and Buddha 
have twice that epoch; and the religion and institutions of 
Moses have thirty centuries; and the Califate in some form 
or other is nearly coeval with the Papacy. The judicious 
eulogist has guarded himself against denying in words any 
of these facts ; but a cool survey of universal history will 
somewhat blunt the edge of Macaulay's trenchant phrases." 

Viewing the whole essay in a broader way, Mr. 
Harrison says again : 

"But, unfortunately, Macaulay, having stated in majestic 
antitheses his problem of 'the unchangeable Church,' makes 
no attempt to provide us with a solution. This splendid eulo- 
gium is not meant to convert us to Catholicism — very far 
from it. Macaulay was no Catholic, and had only a sort of 
literary admiration for the Papacy. As Mr. Cotter Morison 
has shown, he leaves the problem just where he found it, 
and such theories as he offers are not quite trustworthy. He 
does not suggest that the Catholic Church is permanent be- 
cause it possesses truth; but, rather, because men's ideas of 
truth are a matter of idiosyncrasy or digestion. The whole 
essay is not a very safe guide to the history of Protestantism 
or of Catholicism." 

The contrast between Macaulay and Carlyle is quite 
clearly seen in the essays written by the two men On 
History. Macaulay's appeared in the Edinburgh Re- 



12© ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

view in 1828, Carlyle's in Eraser's Magazine in 1830. 
Each writer had already had some successful experi- 
ence in writing, each was destined in a few years to 
do some notable historical writing in accordance with 
the ideas expressed in his essay. 

Each author considers that history in its final analy- 
sis is philosophy teaching by examples. But whereas 
Macaulay assumes that the ability to prognosticate 
political events may be attained through a study of 
history, Carlyle regards this practical end as visionary, 
as an ideal probably forever unattainable. Macaulay 
encourages the historian through the exercise of his 
reasoning and his imaginative powers to attempt to 
convey a reduced but still accurate picture of some re- 
mote period. Carlyle warns the historian against at- 
tempting to portray any but the smallest sections. 

Macaulay insists that the historian must above all 
possess this combination of reasoning power and 
imaginative ability; Carlyle urges the historian to de- 
velop first of all an understanding of the stupendous- 
ness and of the essential impossibility of his task, a 
consciousness of the whole course of history in the 
light of which he may depict his small section of time. 
Most distinctive of all, Macaulay says that history 
must be interesting as well as true, and compares it 
to the work of novelists and dramatists ; while Carlyle 
dismisses the question of interestingness as superficial. 

Thus, whereas Carlyle leaves with the reader the 
impression that the past is awe-full, such as to inspire 
reverence and humility, Macaulay leaves with him the 
impression that the past is merely baffling and difficult 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 121 

to comprehend, Carlyle's essay is awakening, stimu- 
lating, the message, one feels, of a seer; Macaulay's 
essay presents the ordinary view in clear, exquisite, 
convincing form. 

Emerson puts very strongly the whole aspect of 
Macaulay, of which his essay on history is but a single 
expression, in a passage in English Traits, a work 
written when Macaulay was at the height of his 
power and popularity : 

"The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the 
English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches that 
good means good to eat, good to wear, material commodity; 
that the glory of modern philosophy is its direction on 'fruit'; 
to yield economical inventions ; and that its merit is to avoid 
ideas, and avoid morals. He thinks it the distinctive merit 
of the Baconian philosophy, in its triumph over the old Pla- 
tonic, its disentangling the intellect from theories of the all- 
fair and all-Good, and pinning it down to the making a 
better sick-chair and a better wine-whey for an invalid; this 
not ironically, but in good faith; that 'solid advantage,' as 
he calls it, meaning always sensual benefit, is the only good. 
The eminent benefit of astronomy is the better navigation it 
creates, to enable the fruit-ships to bring home their lemons 
and wine to the London grocer. It was a curious result, 
in which the civility and religion of England for a thousand 
years ends in denying morals, and reducing the intellect to 
a saucepan." 

Enough has now been said concerning what Macau- 
lay is not. That the reader needs to be on his guard, 
can withstand some derogatory criticism, will appear 
the moment he begins to read from this brilliant man's 
works. Macaulay's careful yet not obtrusive struc- 



122 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

ture, his utilization of vivid details, and his employ- 
ment of suspense, of climax, or repetition, of verbal 
ornament, will ever create a valiant and well-fortified 
Macaulay following. His mode of expression, all will 
freely grant, is a safer model than Carlyle's. It is 
said that all our best newspaper and magazine writ- 
ing to-day follows examples set by Macaulay. And 
if we may not depend upon him for absolute and final 
dicta nor yet for a stimulus to great or new thoughts, 
we may still read him as a nineteenth-century essayist 
of brilliance, fluency, and charm. 

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN (1801-1890) 
Chronology 
1801 Born, February 21, in London. 
1816 "Conversion." 

1 816 To Trinity College, Oxford. 1818, Trinity scholar- 
ship. Encyclopedia Metropolitana articles. 
Friends — churchmen. 

1827 Preacher at Whitehall, public examiner in classics. 

1828 Vicar of St. Mary's Church, Oxford. 

1832 Trip to southern Europe. Lead, Kindly Light 

(1833). 
1834-1841 Tracts for the Times; Oxford Movement. 
1843 Resigned living at St. Mary's. 
1845 Received into Roman Catholic Church. Preaching 

and lecturing. 
1851 Lost suit occasioned by exposing apostate monk, 

Achilli. Public support of his cause. 
1854 Rector of new Catholic University, Dublin. 
1854 Controversy with Charles Kingsley: Apologia pro 

vita sua. 
1874 Controversy with Gladstone: Letter to the Duke of 

Norfolk. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 123 

1877 Elected honorary fellow of Trinity College. 
1879 Created Cardinal. 
1890 Died, August 11. 



Of the merely interesting which tired minds crave, 
there is little in the works of John Henry, Cardinal 
Newman. Yet an account of the nineteenth century 
would be vastly incomplete with him omitted, just as 
an account of life would be incomplete if it omitted 
the things with which Newman's life was chiefly 
concerned and for which in literature he stands. It 
is well to emphasize the distinguishing feature of New- 
man among essayists. 

We have seen that the nineteenth-century essayists 
previous to Carlyle were men aloof from life, men who 
for the most part took little cognizance of contem- 
porary problems and struggles, men whose works we 
may search almost in vain for any definite reflection of 
what in the early nineteenth century men of England 
and America were seriously discussing. In contrast 
to these men, we saw Carlyle early in life painfully 
examining the signs of the times, determining as best 
he could the needs which they indicated, and striving 
mightily to do his part as a man of letters in meeting 
those needs. We saw Macaulay giving, during most 
of his life, only his spare hours to literature, and tak- 
ing the part of a statesman in dealing with slavery, 
with political reform, with India, Ireland, copyright, 
and so on. 

We shall now find this participating spirit, new to 
essayists of the nineteenth century, exemplified in John 



124 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Henry, later Cardinal, Newman; we shall find that 
the special field in which circumstances and natural 
capacity led him to labor was that of religion, of 
churches and theology. Newman was more than a 
preacher, more than a theologian; but we find in his 
religious thinking and activities the source and secret 
of all that is interesting in his life and powerful in 
his writings. 

Most people, doubtless, do not consider at all the 
respective merits of different creeds. Of those who 
are inclined to weigh and choose, to abandon one creed 
in favor of another, most doubtless come to conclude 
with Stevenson that to do so would be to change 
"only words for other words," and are satisfied with 
him "by some brave reading to embrace it [the old] 
in spirit and truth, and find wrong as wrong for me 
as for the best of other communions." Newman 
was different. To him this affair of churches and 
religion was inseparably bound up with life, indeed 
the chief concern of life. One cannot imagine New- 
man writing Macaulay's cold, impartial sketch of the 
Papacy. To stand off and look at that subject as 
Macaulay did, to be concerned so wholly with out- 
ward manifestations — numbers, progress, checks, pros- 
pects — would have been for him as unnatural as at 
the Day of Judgment to examine the material and 
workmanship of Gabriel's trumpet or to observe the 
size and the disposition of the cohorts of the heavenly 
host. Newman from a child was of such temper and 
mental attitude that he would first have considered 
the credentials of Gabriel and the cohorts, then would 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 125 

have sought to understand their message in all its 
phases, and finally would have vied with the holiest 
saint in sincere worship and intelligent service of the 
Almighty. 

Macaulay accepted the religion which he had in- 
herited, and while he wrote enthusiastically of an 
alien religion, continued placidly and regularly to at- 
tend his parish church. Newman from the first ex- 
amined the tenets of his native religion, sought to 
establish them firmly wherever he found them weak, 
and at length, in middle age, finding that impossible, 
gave up position, friends, followers, and reputation, 
and publicly vowed allegiance to what he had then 
come to believe the true guide in faith and worship. 

Newman and Carlyle present a strange and in- 
teresting contrast. They were alike in many respects. 
Each was thoughtful, serious, analytically and specu- 
latively religious by nature; each as a young man ex- 
perienced what he called a conversion — a vast up- 
heaval of spiritual consciousness which gave form and 
character to his entire life. There the similarity ends. 
Carlyle settled his beliefs once for all; they were con- 
cerned with broad principles only: "The world is not 
the Devil's," he said to himself, "but God's. Thy 
proper pursuit is not happiness, but work — the best 
that lieth in thee. The learned, the strong, the gifted — 
they are those appointed to lead mankind. Forth in 
this faith, strive, fight, lead!" Newman also deter- 
mined certain broad principles — the oneness of God 
and truth, the church God's instrument in the world ; 
but most of his life was spent in defending details of 



126 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

his beliefs — the Anglican Church, its doctrines, its 
ritual; later, the Catholic Church, and the superiority 
of its claims. 

Carlyle recognized the church as a vesture; he ac- 
knowledged its importance as such, possessed himself 
of the reality which it clothed, and never bothered 
to enfold himself in that vesture, to maintain it in 
wholeness and beauty by attending or supporting any 
church institution. Newman, too, recognized the 
church as a vesture, but as such indispensable, the 
prime concern of all earnest men, to be perfected, puri- 
fied, glorified. Carlyle may be considered the acme of 
pious dissent, Newman the acme of intelligent con- 
formity. 

Distinguished from ordinary men of letters by his 
seriousness and sincerity, from Macaulay by the one- 
ness, the integrity of his intellectual and his religious 
faculties, and from Carlyle by the different practical 
bearing of his whole-souled convictions, it was a life 
of struggle, of bitterness, that Newman had to live. 
The term applied to a man who forsakes his religion is 
apostate; it is almost as reproachful and contemptuous 
as deserter or traitor. And even when we remember 
that him whom George III called traitor, others called 
patriot, that an apostate to one religion is the welcome 
convert to another, we know that in both cases heart- 
burnings, uncertainty, sore wrenchings within oneself, 
misunderstanding, vilification, recrimination from 
others are inevitably involved. All these Newman had 
to endure. He endured them all with serene calmness, 
kindness, sweetness. He stands like a colossal, full- 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 127 

surpliced priest in the midst of a hurrying, week-day, 
clamorous throng. 

When John Henry Newman entered Trinity Col- 
lege, Oxford, in 18 16, he was already well furnished 
with religious opinions. He was the son of a pious 
London banker; he had learned to love Scott and the 
Bible ; he was imaginative, and in a way superstitious — 
he had formed a habit of crossing himself whenever 
he entered a dark room. His "conversion," which 
had recently occurred, was not, like Carlyle's, an 
illumination proceeding from a single great idea, but 
the firm and final acceptance of certain dogmas or doc- 
trines — the doctrine of "final perseverance," the doc- 
trines of eternal punishment and eternal happiness, 
and the conviction that his "calling in life would in- 
volve such a sacrifice as celibacy involved." His read- 
ing, moreover, had convinced him that the Pope was 
the Antichrist foretold by Daniel, St. Paul, and St. 
John. 

In 181 8 he distinguished himself by winning a 
Trinity scholarship; but when he had completed his 
course, he was so exhausted from overwork that in- 
stead of securing the high honors almost within his 
grasp, he barely qualified for his degree. Private pupils 
occupied him at Oxford until in 1822 he redeemed his 
reputation as a scholar by winning a fellowship at 
Oriel College. Studying, lecturing, writing here, he 
qualified as a clergyman, and was chosen in 1827 
preacher at Whitehall and public examiner in the 



128 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

classics, and, in 1828, vicar of St. Mary's, the Uni- 
versity Church. So far, comparative harmony. 

By 1832, however, his carefully deliberated opinions 
on several topics — the function of a tutor among them 
— had resulted in such disagreement with the authori- 
ties that he resigned his position at Oriel. With a 
friend he traveled on the Continent, especially in Italy 
and in the islands of the Mediteranean. The Catholic 
religion as he observed its influence there seemed to 
him "degrading and idolatrous." He composed many 
poems; one of them, written while he was becalmed 
for a week on an orange-boat bound from Sicily to 
Marseilles, was Lead, Kindly Light. 

By the time Newman returned to England in 1833, 
the destruction which Carlyle had foretold for all 
existing institutions, seemed really about to seize the 
Anglican Church. The new Parliament, that elected 
under the Reform Bill of 1832, was at work; one of 
its acts, as supreme over church and state, was to 
abolish ten Irish bishoprics. Many people regarded 
this as the first step in a thorough-going revolutionary 
process which should eventually compass the complete 
separation of the Church from the state. A friend 
of Newman's, John Keble, preached a startlirfg ser- 
mon at Oxford on what he called the "national apos- 
tasy." Good and learned Churchmen, Newman among 
them, met together and determined to fight for the 
Church's threatened integrity, for its doctrines and its 
practices. They felt that the Anglican Church had in- 
herited, and was fully entitled to occupy, a more ex- 
alted position than it had ever occupied; it would be 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 129 

their duty and their delight, they concluded, to con- 
vince others, within and without the Church, of this 
fact. 

The meeting of these loyal Giurchmen was the 
beginning and their purpose was the purpose of what 
has been called the Oxford Movement, the effort of 
some scholarly adherents of the Church, most of them 
in residence at Oxford, to rehabilitate and exalt the 
Church of England in England. The movement was 
advanced chiefly through a series of short papers, by 
Newman and others, called Tracts for the Times. In 
them the creed of the Church, the significance of the 
Church's establishment and of its history, its claim 
that it is the direct and legitimate successor of the 
early Christian Church — all these were keenly and 
thoroughly discussed. Newman preached in the same 
vein in St. Mary's Chapel, Oxford. 

Many good Churchmen were bewildered by the 
extent of the claims made by the "Tractarians," many 
denounced them as preposterous, many were convinced 
of their justice and importance. The most lasting 
result of the Movement was the revivifying of the 
Established Church, a renewal of vigor and service- 
ableness which seems to have extended to the remotest 
parishes and the most insignificant phases of the 
Church's activity. Finally, the most startling result 
of the Movement was the conversion of Newman him- 
self, through the very processes of thought which 
had led him to exalt the Anglican Church, to the 
Roman Catholic religion. We need consider only a 
few facts relating to the event. 



130 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

The whole trend of Newman's teaching in Tracts 
for the Times was toward establishing for the Angli- 
can Church the same authority, the same authenticity 
which the Roman Catholic Church claimed. His 
enemies had long maintained that he was virtually a 
Catholic — and to most Englishmen of that day, being 
a Catholic was still almost as bad, though not so 
illegal, as being a thief or a traitor. These critics 
were to be confirmed in their declaration. Tract po, 
the last of the series, which appeared in 1841, had 
for its thesis that the Thirty-Nine Articles oppose not 
the teaching, in only slight measure the dogma, simply 
the dominant errors of Rome. This was far less 
orthodox than anything that had yet been main- 
tained. It developed rabid opposition, the bitterest 
calumny. Newman pursued his thoughts and his 
studies regardless of all criticism. By 1843 he had 
felt compelled to resign his office as preacher at St. 
Mary's, and had written a retraction of what in his 
early writings he had said against Rome and now 
saw to be unfounded. As he wrote these retractions, 
the last lingering doubt as to his proper course finally 
disappeared; in 1845 he was received into the Catholic 
Church, and the next year he quitted Oxford. 

It is obvious how this step would make Newman 
figure in other men's minds. Their contempt and 
hatred appeared in several ways. In 1851, Newman 
saw fit to expose the moral turpitude of a certain 
"converted" monk named Achilli ; he was sued for 
libel; his carefully prepared defense proved inade- 
quate under the circumstances, and he was fined one 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 131 

hundred pounds. This sum, together with his ex- 
penses of some 14,000 pounds, was raised by popular 
subscription — not wholly among Catholics. Two other 
illustrations of the attitude of most English people 
will be mentioned later. 

Newman had planned to live a life of obscure de- 
votion and service in his new religious relations ; when 
a district of England was isolated on account of an 
epidemic of cholera, Newman with a few others in- 
sisted upon remaining in the neighborhood and doing 
all that could be done for the victims of the disease. 
His learning and talents, however, were too remarkable 
and too widely known for him to remain in obscurity. 
He was in demand as a preacher and lecturer before 
Catholic bodies. He was honored by the Pope with 
various offices and duties. 

His own nature led him to give particular atten- 
tion to the means of education provided for Catho- 
lics. In 1854 he was given the honorable and re- 
sponsible position of Rector of the new Catholic Uni- 
versity at Dublin. Organizing such an institution 
was a work for which Newman was poorly fitted; 
it proved, moreover, to be a forlorn project on other 
grounds, and within a few years it was abandoned. 
Newman's lectures, published under the title of Idea 
of a University, constitute, however, a notable and 
lasting outcome of this educational experiment. 

We come now to what was perhaps the most pain- 
ful experience in Newman's life, the one, moreover, 
which called forth his best-known literary work. In 
1864 an anonymous reviewer in a book review of 



132 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Froude's History of England in Macmillan's Mag- 
azine took occasion to say : 

"Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the 
Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, 
and on the whole ought not to be ; that cunning is the weapon 
which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to with- 
stand the brute male force of the wicked world which mar- 
ries and is given in marriage. Whether his notion be doc- 
trinally correct or not, it is at least historically so." 

Newman protested to the editors. The writer, Rev. 
Professor Charles Kingsley, acknowledged to New- 
man the authorship of the article, and they corre- 
sponded on the subject. Kingsley virtually failed to 
prove or to retract. Newman published their corre- 
spondence. Kingsley published a pamphlet. Then 
Newman published, in a series of pamphlets, his fa- 
mous Apologia pro vita sua ( 1864), recounting his re- 
ligious experiences and maintaining that it was his very 
love of truth which had led him all along. It is said 
that the Apologia does not vindicate the Catholic 
Church on Kingsley's charge; but it is universally ac- 
knowledged that the book establishes for all time the 
honesty and rectitude of the man Newman. The book 
is generally considered as a record of religious experi- 
ence comparable only to St. Augustine's Confessions. 
Newman was to be subjected to yet one more attack, 
likewise of nation-wide publicity and importance. This 
time the blow came from the statesman and religious 
controversialist, Gladstone, writing in the Contempo- 
rary Review in 1874. Gladstone maintained that no one 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS I33 

could become converted to Rome without renounc- 
ing moral and intellectual freedom, and, what was of 
more practical importance, civil allegiance. In his 
Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, Newman expressed a 
vigorous, dignified, and effective denial of these 
charges. They seem never to have been seriously and 
intelligently repeated against Catholics since that time. 

How much of the forbearance, the mutual respect, 
and appreciation which to-day characterize Catholics 
and Protestants in their relations with each other, 
may be due to the intelligence, the frankness, and 
the sincerity of Cardinal Newman, it is impossible 
to say. It is easy to believe that Newman's contribu- 
tion to this result is considered by the Recording Angel 
a substantial item. 

Honors, approved successively by more and more 
Protestants, were now heaped upon Newman. In 
1878 he was elected honorary fellow of Trinity Col- 
lege, Oxford, and revisited the University after thirty- 
two years of absence. In 1879 he was created Car- 
dinal. And in 1880 he preached at Oxford. He died, 
August II, 1890. 

Three expressions which are said to have been cur- 
rent at Oxford when Newman entered the University, 
seem to emphasize, by their contrast to expressions of 
our attitude to-day — whatever other features may 
characterize our attitude — what Newman and his labor 
for religion and the Church have accomplished. Not 
a few students at Oxford in the *2o's are said to have 
concluded that "there is nothing new, nothing true, 



134 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

and it doesn't matter"; not many of us can conclude 
that for long. Young aspirants for church positions in 
the '20's are said to have been seriously counseled to 
"improve their Greek and let go visiting the poor." 
There are few young men to-day who would not in- 
dignantly reject such abominable counsel. "O God," 
many of those students are said actually or virtually 
to have prayed, "O God, if there be a God, save my 
soul, if I have a soul." Newman has helped us, more 
and more consistently, either boldly to silence the en- 
tire prayer or intelligently to eliminate the equivocat- 
ing "ifs" in it. 

Newman surely erected a barrier against the drift 
toward atheism. He demonstrated, moreover, that in- 
telligent faith and earnest works must go together. 
And he helped to make hypocrisy in the guise of out- 
ward conformity appear properly detestable. What 
more he accomplished, how completely right he was in 
his conclusions as to details, time alone can tell. The 
intensity, the earnestness, the intellectuality of the 
nineteenth century, we may safely conclude, are 
largely explained by the existence and the activity of 
Cardinal Newman. 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882) 
Chronology 

1803 Born, May 25, in Boston, Massachusetts. Clergy- 

man ancestry. Mary Moody Emerson, his aunt. 

1804 Father and others founded Monthly Anthology and 

Boston Review (forerunner of North American 
Review). 
1817 Graduated from Boston Latin School. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS I3S 

1817-1821 At Harvard College. School teaching. Stud- 
ies. 

1826 Approbated to preach, Unitarian. 

1830 Pastor of Second Unitarian Church, Boston. Mar- 
ried Miss Tucker. 1831, Death of wife. 1832, 
Resigned pastorate — ill-health and scruples. Vis- 
ited England and Continent, and met Carlyle. 

1835 Married Miss Jackson. Settled in Concord. Lec- 
tures. Nature published (500 copies, thirteen 
years). 

1837 Address on The American Scholar before Harvard 

Phi Beta Kappa society. 

1838 Harvard Divinity School Address; orthodox ani- 

mosity. 

1840 The Dial begun; i844ff., Emerson its editor. 

1841 Essays, First Series; 1844, Essays, Second Series. 

1846 Poems. 

1847 Lecture tour in England and Scotland. 
1850 Representative Men. 1856, English Traits. 
i860 Conduct of Life (edition exhausted in forty-eight 

hours). 
1867 May Day and Other Poems. 1870, Society and 

Solitude. 
1875 Letters and Social Aims. 
1882 Died at Concord, April 27. 

In 1824 a Cambridge, Massachusetts, school teacher 
and divinity student, just come of age, wrote in his 
journal as follows : 

"Apart from the vastness of transitory volumes v^^hich 
occasional politics or a thousand ephemeral magnalia elicit, 
. . . there is another sort of book which appears now and 
then in the world, once in two or three centuries perhaps, 
and which soon or late gets a foothold in popular esteem. I 
allude to those books which collect and embody the wisdom 



136 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

of their times, and so mark the stages of human improve- 
ment. Such are the Proverbs of Solomon, the Essays of 
Montaigne, and eminently the Essays of Bacon. ... I should 
like to add another volume to this valuable work. I am not 
so foolhardy as to write Sequel to Bacon on my title-page; 
and there are some reasons that induce me to suppose that 
the undertaking of this enterprise does not imply any censur- 
able arrogance." 

Other men have repeatedly written — what this man's 
modesty kept him from writing — Sequel to Bacon, or 
words to that effect, on the title-pages of the books of 
essays which he came to write. They call him the 
most original thinker since Bacon, "the Columbus of 
modern thought." His name was Ralph Waldo Emer- 
son. We must try to understand why men assign to 
him so important a place. 

Carlyle, as has been pointed out, in the midst of 
those political, social, and religious difficulties of 
1 820- 1 830, concluded that the structure of society 
was breaking down, the whole fabric being consumed. 
He saw, nevertheless, some hopeful features. New 
political and social conditions, he said, would result 
from the great human facts of heroism and hero- 
worship. A new and glorious religion, moreover, was 
certain, he said, to develop from literature, with its 
pulpit set up wherever there was a printing-press, and 
one great Priest-Prophet already apparent in Goethe — 
one "to whom the Godlike had revealed itself, through 
all meanest and highest forms of the Common; and by 
him been again prophetically revealed; in whose in- 
spired melody . . . Man's Hfe again begins ... to 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS I37 

be divine." Assuming the existence of this religion 
of letters, we may conclude that some future historian 
of its Fathers will treat next to Goethe, Carlyle; and 
next, one as great as either of the others, — Emerson. 
May we assume the existence of a religion, a church, 
embodied in literature ? We must admit, Carlyle would 
have had to admit, that the ultimate destruction of 
other embodiments of religion, other churches, has at 
least been postponed. But judging broadly, on the 
most obvious facts, with the spread of popular educa- 
tion, the increase in the number of the reading public, 
the character and volume of printed ideas which are 
circulated, may not Carlyle's prophecy be said to be 
being fulfilled? Is there a modem sermon which in 
circulation, influence, plain every-day effect upon life 
is to be compared with Newman's Lead, Kindly Light, 
Tennyson's Crossing the Bar, or Kipling's Reces- 
sional? How does the audience reached by even the 
most obscure literary expression — magazine article or 
story, newspaper editorial or item — compare with the 
congregation reached by the most largely attended 
church service or the most popular preacher? The 
question would not have arisen in 1814. 

This is all germane to the subject of Emerson and 
his position in American literature and American 
life. Carlyle, finding himself unable to subscribe to 
the doctrines of any church, devoted himself to litera- 
ture. Emerson, after proving that he could preach 
acceptably, deliberately forsook the ministry in order 



138 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

that he might be priest and preacher of the religion 
which speaks in print. 

What was the result? A thoughtful and observing 
Englishman who visited this country late in Emer- 
son's life, after touring the country for some time, 
reported that he had heard many sermons but only 
one preacher — Emerson. Now those preachers did 
not all know that they were preaching Emerson's 
thoughts; his writings had permeated and leavened 
men's minds; the old church had become the mouth- 
piece of the new. It could probably be shown that 
in so far as the preaching of to-day in all denomina- 
tions differs from what it was a hundred years ago, the 
difference is largely Emerson. 

Of course, the vast influence of Emerson is ex- 
hibited only partly in what we think of as church 
matters. This religion of literature which he promoted 
is catholic as life, as mankind. It is difficult to be 
specific in describing his influence. We are still too 
near to him to distinguish it clearly. It could be 
safely maintained and clearly established, for one 
thing, however, that the most significant movement 
in education in the nineteenth century, the institution 
and progress of the elective system, may be traced to 
ideas inculcated by Emerson.^ If men accepted his 

* "Charles W. Eliot, ex-President of Harvard University, emi- 
nent educator and man of affairs, says : 'As a young man I 
found the writings of Emerson unattractive, and not seldom 
unintelligible. . . . But when I had got at what proved to be my 
lifework for education, I discovered in Emerson's poems and 
essays all the fundamental motives and principles of my hourly 
struggle against educational routine and tradition.' " From 
Emerson, by D. L. Maulsby, Tufts College, Mass., 191 1, p. 164. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 139 

views — as they were sure sooner or later to do — a 
high degree of freedom in choice of studies was as 
inevitable as the lapse of time. 

Consider another specific case. It is difficult for us 
to get Hazlitt's point of view in On the Ignorance 
of the Learned. "Learning is," says Hazlitt, "in too 
many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute 
for true knowledge. Books are less often made use 
of as 'spectacles' to look at nature with, than as blinds 
to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from 
weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The book-worm 
wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, 
and sees only the glimmering shadows of things re- 
flected from the minds of others. Nature puts him 
out." We do not so regard what we call learning. 
What is the explanation? It is partly that Emerson 
has lived and written and influenced men since Haz- 
litt wrote. Most of Emerson's writing not only illus- 
trates but emphasizes positively what Hazlitt em- 
phasized negatively. Learning, says Hazlitt, is folly ; 
learning, says Emerson, should be, must be wisdom. 
"Nature," says Hazlitt, "puts him [the learned man] 
out!" Nature, said Emerson in his first work, and 
repeatedly through his life, should and must be the 
learned man's chief object of study and contemplation. 
Not books only or chiefly, but the face of nature, men, 
himself, must the student be concerned with. 

See further wherein Hazlitt says the learned (he 
included most literary men of his time) fell short : 

"Learning is the knowledge of that which is not generally 
known to others, and which we can only derive at second- 



140 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

hand from books or other artificial sources. The knowledge 
of that which is before us, or about us, which appeals to our 
experience, passions, and pursuits, to the bosoms and busi- 
nesses of men, is not learning. Learning is the knowledge 
of that which none but the learned know. He is the most 
learned man who knows the most of what is farthest re- 
moved from common life and actual observation, that is of 
the least practical utility, and least liable to be brought to 
the test of experience . . ." 

Are not these the very things that learned men are 
to-day primarily or ultimately concerned with ? Emer- 
son has made necessary a footnote to the term "learn- 
ing" as used by Hazlitt. The philosophical lectures 
and writings of President Hyde and Professor Berg- 
son, the few poems which are widely read, the essays 
and the many novels and stories — all are alike in 
this, that they appeal "to our experience, passions, 
and pursuits, to the bosoms and businesses of men," 
that they are human in the extreme. The criticism 
of learning voiced by Hazlitt is still occasionally re- 
peated, but it is the one which men in every intellectual 
realm, seriously and deeply applied, regard as damning. 
This does not mean that Emerson was a mere utili- 
tarian. It was the highest wisdom which he found 
and which he taught others to find in the things of 
daily life. Witness this gleaming passage from 
Civilization : 

"Civilization depends upon morality. Everything good in 
man leans on what is higher. This rule holds in small as in 
great. Thus all our strength and success in the work of our 
hands depends on our borrowing the aid of the elements. 
You have seen a carpenter on a ladder with a broad-axe 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 141 

chopping upward chips from a beam. How awkward ! At 
what disadvantage he works ! But see him on the ground, 
dressing his timber under him. Now, not his feeble muscles 
but the force of gravity brings down the axe; that is to 
say, the planet itself splits his stick. The farmer had much 
ill-temper, laziness and shirking to endure from his hand- 
sawyers, until one day he bethought him to put his saw- 
mill on the edge of a waterfall; and the river never tires 
of turning his wheel; the river is good-natured, and never 
hints an objection. ... I admire still more than the saw- 
mill the skill which on the sea-shore makes the tides drive 
the wheels and grind corn, and which thus engages the as- 
sistance of the moon, like a hired hand, to grind, and wind, 
and pump, and saw, and split stone, and roll iron. 

"Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his 
labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by 
the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by 
borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, 
gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day 
by day and cost us nothing. . . . 

"All our arts aim to win this vantage. We cannot bring 
the heavenly powers to us, but if we will only choose our 
jobs in directions in which they travel, they will undertake 
them with the greatest pleasure. It is a peremptory rule with 
them that they never go out of their road. We are dapper 
little busybodies and run this way and that way super- 
serviceably; but they swerve never from their foreordained 
paths, — neither the sun, nor the moon, nor a bubble of air, 
nor a mote of dust. . . . 

"Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry 
works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie 
and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams 
going the other way, — Charles's Wain, Great Bear, Orion, 
Leo, Hercules : every god will leave us. Work rather for 
those interests which the divinities honor and promote — 
justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility." 



142 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Such teaching, such an example, has had an in- 
fluence upon thought and action since Emerson wrote 
it. Lowell in his A Fable for Critics characterizes 
Emerson as: 

"A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range 
Has Olympus for one pole, for t'other the Exchange." 

Few men since Emerson are inactive in the region 
typified by "the Exchange" ; more and more men, 
there is reason to believe, since his time, range near to 
Olympus as well. 

This account of Emerson's activity and influence 
in the pulpit of letters is an important preliminary 
to a detailed account of his life. The effect of the 
whole cannot be adequately conveyed by a scrutiny of 
the parts. Keep in mind the significance of the teach- 
ings of this calm, active, self-reliant and far-seeing 
man, as we see where and how he lived and was suc- 
cessively employed. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson's father had been pastor of 
the Congregational Church at Concord, Massachu- 
setts, during the Revolution. Later he had become 
pastor of the First Church of Boston. In Boston 
Ralph Waldo, the second of five sons, was born on 
May 25, 1803. Seven distinguished clergymen are 
said to have been among the boy's immediate ancestors. 
His father was prominent in the small but brilliant 
group of men of literary tastes then in Boston, and be- 
came editor of The Monthly Anthology and Boston 
Review J established in 1804, the precursor of the North 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS I43 

American Review (established in 1815). That the 
literary activity indicated by all this was considerable 
we shall find evidence. 

Emerson attended the Boston Grammar School, 
the Boston Latin School, and from 181 7 to 1821, 
Harvard College. More important in its influence 
upon him than any of these experiences was the 
intellectual companionship of his aunt, Mary Moody 
Emerson, a gifted though eccentric woman of wide 
reading and exquisite taste. In college he stood high, 
but not among the highest; he took but a second 
prize in a senior essay-competition, and he consented 
to write the class poem at graduation after the honor 
had been declined in turn by seven others. His real ac- 
tivities during these days are exhibited in his Journal: 
the nature and the variety of his reading, his long, 
long thoughts, his experiments in composition, in 
self-expression. 

In his vacations he taught school, for his family was 
poor; and on graduating from college he continued 
to teach, and at the same time studied for his father's 
profession, the ministry. Without completing his 
formal studies he was approbated as a preacher of the 
Unitarian Church in 1826. 

Emerson's Journal refers very early to the essays 
which were appearing from time to time by one T. 
Carlyle, a Scotch contributor to the Edinburgh Review 
and other reviews. But before Carlyle had begun to 
preach audibly, some of the doctrines he was to stress 
had been acted upon by Emerson. Almost simulta- 
neously these two men, on opposite sides of the Atlan- 



144 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

tic, were actuated by some of the same great principles. 
That doctrine of piercing through the superficial to the 
essence, early dominated Emerson. As a successful 
preacher in Boston, it led him to question, not lightly, 
but deeply and seriously, two features of the church 
services. One of these features was the custom of 
offering prayer. He says: 

"That it is right to ask God's blessing on us is certainly- 
reasonable. That it is right to enumerate our wants, our 
sins, even our sentiments, in addresses to this unseen Idea, 
seems just and natural. And it may probably be averred 
with safety that there has been no man who never prayed. 
That persons whom like circumstances and like feelings as- 
similate, that a family, that a picked society of friends, should 
unite in this service, does not, I conceive, violate any precept 
of just reason. It certainly is a question of more difficult 
solution whether a promiscuous assemblage such as is con- 
tained in houses of public worship, and collected by such 
motives, can unite with propriety to advantage in any peti- 
tion such as is usually offered by one man. . . . 

"The man who prays is in quite another mood from the 
man who hears, and tones and language which we have once 
become accustomed to regard with suspicion or at best with 
admiration, it will be long ere we learn to listen to them with 
sympathy. The truth is, public prayer is rather the off- 
spring of our notions of what ought to be, than of what is. 
It has grown out of the sentiment of a few, rather than the 
reason of many." 

The other feature was the periodical celebration of 
the Communion. Emerson came to the conclusion that 
it had not been intended by Christ for a perpetual 
institution. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS I4S 

Other beliefs which he had acquired made him 
trust his own judgment as to these two. He says 
further in his Journal: 

"Hypocrisy is the attendant of false religion. When peo- 
ple imagine that others can be their priests, they may well 
fear hypocrisy. Whenever they understand that no religion 
can do them any more good than they can actually taste, 
they have done fearing hypocrisy." 

"I suppose it is not wise, not being natural, to belong to 
any religious party. In the Bible you are not directed to be 
a Unitarian, or a Calvinist, or an Episcopalian. Now if a 
man is wise, he will not only not profess himself to be a 
Unitarian, but he will say to himself, I am not a member 
of that or of any party. I am God's child, a disciple of 
Christ, or, in the eye of God, a fellow-disciple with Christ." 

"The great difficulty is that men do not think enough of 
themselves, do not consider what it is that they are sacrific- 
ing, when they follow in a herd, or when they cater for their 
establishment. They know not how divine is a man. ... A 
man should learn to detect and foster that gleam of light 
which flashes across his mind from within far more than the 
luster of the whole firmament without. Yet he dismisses 
without notice his peculiar thought because it is peculiar. 
The time will come when he will postpone all acquired 
knowledge to this spontaneous wisdom, and will watch for 
this illumination more than those who watch for the morn- 
ing." 

It is plain to what this Carlylean habit (not imi- 
tated from Carlyle, remember, but Hkewise native to 
Emerson) of seeing was leading Emerson : Rely upon 
your own flashes of insight, sects are to say the least 
superfluous, certain religious customs are unfounded 



146 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

and unwise. Soon he wrote : "I have sometimes 
thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was 
necessary to leave the ministry." When this crisis 
in his thought was reached he first retired to the 
White Mountains to think it over carefully, then 
preached a simple sermon from his pulpit in the Second 
Church in Boston, stating his views and his inability 
to continue as minister if the church customs remained 
unchanged. His Journal records the outcome : the 
proposed changes were voted down, and his resigna- 
tion was accepted. This was in 1832. Henceforth 
Emerson was to be a minister outside the church, a 
preacher from the free and broad lecture platform, a 
high priest of the religion of letters. 

The literary circle to which Emerson like his father 
belonged, the patrons of early American reviews, read 
with great attention the English reviews. Emerson, 
as has been said, had been early attracted by different 
articles in the Edinburgh Review from the hand, which 
he promptly came to recognize, of a certain "German- 
ick light writer." He records in October, 1832: 

"I am cheered and instructed by this paper on Corn Law 
Rhymes in the Edinburgh by my Germanick new-light writer, 
whoever he be. He gives us confidence in our principles. He 
assures the truth-lover everywhere of sympathy. Blessed art 
that makes books, and so joins me to that stranger by this 
perfect railroad." 

"H Carlyle knew what an interest I have in his persistent 
goodness, would it not be worth one effort more, one prayer, 
one meditation? But will he resist the Deluge of bad ex- 
ample in England? One manifestation of goodness in a 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS I47 

noble soul brings him in debt to all the beholders that he 
shall not betray their love and trust which he has awak- 
ened." 

The character of this young periodical writer and 
the prospect of seeing other loved authors — Words- 
worth and Coleridge among them, together with his 
need of rest and variety after his recent critical experi- 
ences, led Emerson to travel in Europe. He says at 
the beginning of English Traits: 

"Like most young men at that time, I was much indebted 
to the men of Edinburgh and of the Edinburgh Review — to 
Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Hallam, and to Scott, Playfair, and De 
Quincey; and my narrow and desultory reading had inspired 
the wish to see the faces of three or four writers, — Coleridge, 
Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, and the latest and strong- 
est contributor to the critical journals, Carlyle; and I sup- 
pose if I had sifted the reasons that led me to Europe, when 
I was ill and was advised to travel, it was mainly the attrac- 
tion of these persons." 

In 1833 Emerson returned to America, and set 
seriously to work upon a series of essays which should 
convey the kernel of his best thinking. The spirit 
in which he wrought is indicated by this entry in his 
Journal in November, 1834: 

"Henceforth I design not to utter any speech, poem or 
book that is not entirely and peculiarly my work, I will say 
at public lectures and the like, those things which I have 
meditated for their own sake and not for the first time with 
a view to that occasion." 



148 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

His work as a thinker and a writer was facilitated 
by his removal to Concord to live in 1835. That year 
his series of essays appeared : the title, Nature, in- 
dicated what it emphasized. Carlyle wrote him : 

"Your little azure-colored Nature gave me true satisfaction. 
I read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintances that 
had a sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict 
always came back. You say it is the first chapter of some- 
thing greater. I call it rather the Foundation and Ground- 
plan on which you may build whatsoever of great and true 
has been given you to build. It is the true Apocalypse, this 
when the 'Open Secret' becomes revealed to a man. I re- 
joice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look 
out on this wondrous dwelling-place of yours and mine — 
with an ear for the Ewigen Melodien which pipe in the winds 
round us, and utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights 
and things: not to be written down by gamut-machinery; 
but which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write 
down." 



These two friends, Carlyle and Emerson, were 
rapidly cementing their relation. Emerson tried in 
vain to persuade Carlyle to give lectures in America. 
But in 1836 he did publish an American edition of 
Sartor Resartus — shorn of the eccentricity, dear to 
Carlyle, of frequent capital letters; and the sum of 
money realized by the sale, accounted for in honest 
Yankee fashion, was a most welcome benison to Car- 
lyle. Emerson edited an edition of Carlyle's Essays 
also, in 1836. 

Two notable addresses were the next important 
fruits of Emerson's retirement. Each may almost 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS i49 

be said to have resounded through the century. In 
1837 he gave as the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Har- 
vard an address on The American Scholar. It re- 
iterated one of the thoughts of Nature, the thought 
that true knowledge must be sought through direct 
contact with things, with nature ; it also declared that 
American scholars, hitherto the obsequious imitators 
of European thinkers, owed it to themselves and to the 
world to proceed upon the new principle of scholar- 
ship. The speech has been called the declaration of 
American intellectual independence. 

The other address created bitterness. It was de- 
livered at the Harvard Divinity School in 1838. Em- 
erson pointed out certain ways in which it seemed 
to him that religion and God were being misrepre- 
sented by contemporary thinkers and preachers. He 
urged the divinity students not to withdraw, how- 
ever, from established sects and institutions (as he 
himself had felt obliged to do), but to transform, to 
enlarge them from within. Orthodox church people 
now centered upon Emerson the fire of criticism and 
denunciation which had previously been directed 
against the Unitarians as a sect. They called him a 
deist and a pantheist. They would not look at his 
writings (it took thirteen years to dispose of 500 copies 
of Nature). In the sight of many people Harvard 
was long stigmatized for having countenanced Emer- 
son's sentiments. Yet from pulpits of all denomina- 
tions one now hears the thoughts of this Divinity 
School Address repeated ; and a young reader to-day 
is apt to wonder why it created a stir. 



ISO ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Just as Carlyle had expressed in Sartor the ideals 
which he was to emphasize and apply throughout his 
career, so Emerson had expressed his great messages 
in Nature and in the two great addresses. From 
lecture platform and lyceum desk throughout the 
United States and once in England (in the series pub- 
lished as Representative Men) he kept reiterating 
them in various forms, gradually attracting listeners, 
slowly spreading his ideas. His two series of Essays 
(1841, 1844), his Poems (1846), and other series 
of essays preserved his thoughts in print. By i860 
his tangible audience had increased enough to buy 
up an entire edition of The Conduct of Life in forty- 
eight hours. 

In 1866, Emerson received an LL.D. from Harvard. 
In 1875 his last important production appeared. Let- 
ters and Social Aims. As he had felt his physical and 
intellectual vigor declining he had resignedly given 
up active work. On April 27, 1882, he died at Con- 
cord with his eyes resting fondly on a portrait of Car- 
lyle which hung in his room. On a shaded knoll in 
what is known as Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, a huge 
rough red granite boulder marks his grave. 

When Professor Josiah Royce, a few years ago, 
wished to indicate the greatness of the late William 
James, he declared that James was the third great 
American thinker, the first in time being Jonathan 
Edwards, and the second Emerson. It was high praise 
for James, high also for Edwards; the preeminence 
of Emerson among American authors, as a thinker and 
as an essayist, is unquestioned. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS iSi 

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-1863) 
Chronology 

181 1 Born, July 18, at Calcutta. 

1816 Father died. 1817, to England with mother. 

1822-1828 At Charterhouse School. 

1 829-1 830 At Trinity College, Cambridge. Travel. Art 
studies and ambitions. Legal studies. Journalism. 

1836 Married a Miss Shawe. Illness — insanity of wife. 
Articles and reviews for the Times. Tours, 
sketches. 

1841 Punch founded; Thackeray a contributor until 1851 
— Snob Papers, etc., 380 sketches in all. 

1847-1848 Vanity Fair published serially. 1848, Pen- 
dennis. 1851, English Humorists. 1855, New- 
comes, Four Georges. 1857, Virginians. Quar- 
rel with Dickens. 

1860-1862 Editor of Cornhill Magazine. Roundabout 
Papers, Adventures of Philip, Denis Duval. 

1863 Died, December 24. 

The Philosophy of Good-Night Literature : what a 
fascinating subject for study that would be! First an 
analysis of that state of mind most conducive to 
sound and refreshing slumber — a state which, like 
the ensuing slumber itself, is pretty much the same 
for all the sons and all the daughters of Adam and 
Eve. Second, a discriminating compilation of those 
portions of literature which, experience shows, produce 
the desirable ante-somnolent state of mind. One can 
here merely suggest this plan of treatment and adduce 
a few facts for the compilation. Thackeray declares 
that Montaigne and Howell's Letters were his bedside 
books. A certain able physician states that he keeps 



152 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

at his bedside Holmes's Breakfast Table Series. Robert 
Louis Stevenson, as stated above, kept Hazlitt. It is 
surely pertinent to add that the bookshelf beside the 
bed in any prospective mansion may well accommodate 
all of what are referred to as the twenty-six volumes 
written by Thackeray himself. "A dip into the volume 
at random," to quote from one of his volumes now, 
"and so on for a page or two; and now and then a 
smile [almost indispensable to this ante-somnolent con- 
dition] ; and presently a gape ; and then the book drops 
out of your hand ; and so bon soir, and pleasant 
dreams to you." 

Some may be surprised to read that Thackeray 
should be considered as a Good-Night author; they 
think of him as a novelist in particular and as a cynic 
in general. As a novelist he writes too much and too 
sequaciously for a good-nighter ; and as a cynic he 
causes snarls and sniffs, not smiles and easy gapes : so 
they may think. 

Would that Thackeray might draw a picture of such 
a person ! Fancy the Punch cartoon he would make : 
Ten heavy volumes on table; Reader in dressing- 
gown and nightcap, glum, frowning, upright; great 
misshapen serpent of a plot, bestridden by scandalous 
little devils or glooms, winding out of books and men- 
acing Sleep as he stands at door; under table, or on 
shelf behind Reader's back, sixteen other volumes, 
dusty but jovially beckoning, with joys, fancies, oddi- 
ties, bulging out between pages and stitching, like ani- 
mals out of a Noah's Ark or that bewildering, unsup- 
pered lot of children out of the Old Woman's Home 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 1S3 

in a Shoe. And a strange thing about the picture 
would be that after one had seen the jovial volumes 
on the shelf, he would see other perky little joys peek- 
ing out of those ten heavy novel volumes on the table, 
and even obscuring the devils as they scampered over 
the folds of the serpent-plot. 

For what about this cynic nickname ? Bear in mind 
the root meaning — Greek, kunikos; Latin, canis; Eng- 
lish — dog. And to get momentarily the sensation and 
mental attitude of a cynic, just lift your upper lip 
so as to expose the tips of your canine teeth. There ! 
you cannot hold it long : neither could Thackeray ! 
If one's impression from his novels has induced the 
belief that he could long act the cynic, a hasty study 
of his life and other works will doubtless be enough 
to eradicate or to modify that impression. 

There is a contrasting impression that Thackeray 
makes, as extreme, perhaps, as this of cynicism, but 
nevertheless a good and necessary foil to it. Char- 
lotte Bronte, in a dedication prefixed to the second 
edition of Jane Eyre, wrote as follows : 

"There is a man in our own days whose words are not 
framed to tickle delicate ears : who, to my thinking, comes 
before the great ones of society much as the son of Imlah 
came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel; and 
who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and 
as vital — a mien as dauntless and as daring. ... I think if 
some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek fire of his 
sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his 
denunciation, were to take his warnings in time — they or 
their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead. 



154 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

"Why have I alluded to this man ? I have alluded to him, 
reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder 
and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recog- 
nized; because I regard him as the first social regenerator 
of the day — as the very master of that working corps who 
would restore to rectitude the warped system of things." 

These words refer not to Carlyle, but to the author 
of various and sundry sketches, satires, burlesques, es- 
says and criticisms ; to the man who had recently pub- 
lished his first novel, entitled Vanity Fair. 

Now, of course, Thackeray was not merely a cynic 
nor a buffoon, nor primarily a prophet and social re- 
generator. Yet he surely resembles Carlyle more 
closely than he does Dean Swift or — Bill Nye. And 
more and more he impresses one as being a mixture 
of all that was best in Carlyle on the one hand, and 
in Charles Lamb on the other — with, of course, other 
elements, which, to parody Lowell's description of Irv- 
ing, were 

Neither Scottish nor Cockney, just Thackeray. 

On this point let us hear first the sequel of the Jane 
Eyre dedication, and then see what Thackeray really 
tried to do. When Charlotte Bronte wrote the dedi- 
cation quoted above, she was young, enthusiastic, 
serious-minded, and acquainted with Thackeray only 
through his works. There is an anecdote, of doubt- 
ful authenticity but surely true in spirit, concerning 
the first meeting of the two at a formal dinner. The 
account runs as follows: 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS I55 

"The tiny creature had idealized Thackeray, personally 
unknown to her, with a passion of idealization. 'Behold, a 
lion Cometh out of the North !' she quoted under her breath, 
as Thackeray entered the drawing-room. Some one repeated 
it to him. 'Oh, Lord !' said Thackeray, 'and I'm nothing but 
a poor devil of an Englishman, ravenous for my dinner !' 
At dinner Miss Bronte was placed opposite Thackeray by 
her own request. 'And I had,' said he, 'the miserable humilia- 
tion of seeing her ideal of him disappearing down my own 
throat, as everything went into my mouth and nothing came 
out of it; until at last, as I took my fifth potato, she leaned 
across, with clasped hands and tears in her eyes, and breathed 
imploringly, "Oh, Mr. Thackeray ! Don't !" ' " 

Now, notwithstanding the fact that Thackeray's great 
body (he was six feet three) doubtless required abun- 
dance of food, one may readily believe that he didn't 
want more than three potatoes at that dinner. — ^He 
took the most effective way of checking Miss Bronte's 
sentimental attitude. Lamb supplanted similar stilted 
sentimentalism by hearty and wholesome laughter 
when he said : "This is my sister Mary. She is a 
very good woman, but she d-d-drinks!" 

What was Thackeray really trying to do in his 
books ? Unquestionably he was trying, for one thing, 
to earn a living — as Carlyle sarcastically phrased it, 
he was "writing for his life." But in doing that he 
was as consistent in method and in purpose, from his 
first articles to his latest, as indomitable Carlyle him- 
self. 

In Thackeray's day people were worshiping Scott 
for his representation of past times as superbly good, 



iS6 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

noble, and romantic; Dickens for representing lower 
and middle classes as ineffably tender, sweet, and 
lovely; Bulwer-Lytton for depicting a life which never 
existed in terms that human beings could never con- 
sistently use; Disraeli and others for idly lolling in 
sentiment ; and still others for making heroes of crimi- 
nals and outcasts. Thackeray's keen sense of humor, 
his common sense, were offended. Why deceive our- 
selves? said he. Why not understand that human 
beings are not simple, not linear or plane, but solid, 
complex, mixtures of admirable and regrettable? Why 
not face the truth? 

We have several frank statements of all this; here 
are two, each having to do with Vanity Fair: 

"The author of this work has lately been described by 
the London Times newspaper as a writer of considerable 
parts, but a dreary misanthrope, who sees no good anywhere, 
who sees the sky above him green, I think, instead of blue, 
and only miserable sinners around him. So we are, as is 
every writer and reader I ever heard of, so was every being 
who ever trod this earth, save One. I cannot help telling 
the truth as I view it, and describing what I see. To de- 
scribe it otherwise than it seems to me would be falsehood 
in that calling in which it has pleased Heaven to place me; 
treason to that conscience which says that men are weak; 
that truth must be told; that faults must be owned; that 
pardon must be prayed for; and that love reigns supreme 
over all." 

"My kind reader will please to remember that this history 
has Vanity Fair for a title, and that Vanity Fair is a very 
vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and 
falseness and pretensions. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS i57 

"People there are living and flourishing in the world . . . 
with no reverence except for prosperity, and no eye for any- 
thing beyond success — faithless, hopeless, charityless. Let us 
have at them, dear friends, with might and main." 

It is worth while to observe closely two vivid ex- 
amples of the stripped, truthful Thackeray method of 
presentation, and these, as most striking in little, from 
the realm of pathos. Recall those long accounts in 
Dickens of the death of Paul Dombey and that of 
Sidney Carton, how carefully and elaborately the stage 
is set, how every detail is utilized to its fullest extent 
as a means of inducing heart-throbs and tears. Listen 
by contrast to these by Thackeray. One narrates what 
happened just after Samuel Titmarsh had secured new 
lodgings in Paris for his wife and their newborn 
child : 

"It was not, however, destined that she and her child should 
inhabit that little garret. We were to leave our lodgings 
on Monday morning ; but on Saturday evening the child was 
seized with convulsions, and all day Sunday the mother 
watched and prayed for it; but it pleased God to take the 
innocent infant from us, and on Sunday, at midnight, it lay 
a corpse in its mother's bosom. Amen. We have other 
children, happy and well, now round about us, and from the 
father's heart the memory of this little thing has almost 
faded; but I do believe that every day of her life the mother 
thinks of the firstborn that was with her for so short a 
while : many and many a time has she taken her daughters to 
the grave, in Saint Bride's, where he lies buried; and she 
wears still at her neck a little, little lock of gold hair, which 
she took from the head of the infant as he lay smiling in his 
coffin. It has happened to me to forget the child's birthday, 
but to her never; and often in the midst of common talk 



IS8 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

comes something that shows she is thinking of the child 
still." 

The other passage succeeds a description of the city 
of Brussels during the battle of Waterloo some miles 
outside of the city; the chapter, a critical one in the 
story of Vanity Fair, ends thus : 

"No more firing was heard at Brussels — the pursuit rolled 
miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city : and 
Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, 
dead, with a bullet through his heart." 

The briskness of thought, the good-nature and the 
good sense of Thackeray, faintly indicated by these 
anecdotes and passages, all tend to produce the ante- 
somnolent state of mind, — a healthy state of mind, 
one good for rising and for living by as well! 

Let us see who Thackeray was and what were his 
memorable experiences. Like so many other English 
writers, he drifted into literature. Born in Calcutta, 
the only son of a high-grade civil service employee, 
educated at the Charterhouse, the school of Addison 
and Steele, he spent a few months at Trinity College, 
Cambridge. His patrimony was large and his inter- 
ests were varied. He traveled ; attempted law, only to 
find it too "cold-blooded" ; studied and practised draw- 
ing — he was rejected fey Dickens as an illustrator for 
Pickwick Papers. He lost large sums of money in 
newspaper and other legitimate ventures, also some 
money in gambling, and was at length compelled to 
work for his bread. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS I59 

He made the most of his opportunities in jour- 
nalism; and, although much that he wrote consisted 
of purely ephemeral sketches and burlesques, he had 
serious articles also on the annual art exhibitions, and 
his review of Carlyle's French Revolution was notably 
discriminating and appreciative. His sketches and 
tales suggested Fielding and Goldsmith, but for some 
reason they did not find favor with the public. Even 
in Punch, which was established by several of his 
friends in 1841, his early contributions (there were 
380 in all before he severed the connection in 185 1) 
secured him no very wide attention. At last, in 1847- 
1848, with a novel distinct in tone from others which 
were being published, with Vanity Fair, he won rec- 
ognition. Mrs. Carlyle promptly wrote to Carlyle that 
Thackeray "beats Dickens out of the world." 

His other great novels followed: Pendennis (1848), 
Henry Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1855), and 
The Virginians (1857). In 1852 he came to America 
in company with James Russell Lowell to deliver his 
lectures on The English Humorists. In 1855 he made 
another lecture tour in America with The Four 
Georges. Each tour was undertaken largely to pro- 
vide for the support of his daughters. 

After the appearance of Vanity Fair, the relations 
between Dickens enthusiasts and Thackeray enthusi- 
asts had often become bitter. The two authors, on 
the contrary, who knew each other well, had gone on 
doing their work, and each had maintained a healthy 
friendship for the other. At length, a difference of 
opinion over a mutual friend, aggravated by some 



i6o ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

indiscreet expressions from each man, created a wide 
and most unfortunate breach between them. Just a 
few days before Thackeray's death, however, it is 
pleasant to record, they met on the steps of a build- 
ing in London, passed coldly, then turned at the same 
moment and spontaneously shook hands. Neither 
writer, it is pleasant to record further, has received 
more glowing tributes than those recorded by the 
other. 

But little additional information about Thackeray 
is necessary. His most important productions as an 
essayist appeared late in his life in the Cornhill Maga- 
zine, of which he was the first editor. Tennyson, 
Trollope, and Ruskin were among the contributors. 
And the series prepared by Thackeray under the 
title of Roundabout Papers reflect his most charming 
and most wholesome moods. 

His last novels, Lovel the Widower, The Adventures 
of Philip, and Denis Duval, also appeared in Corn- 
hill. The third of these was left incomplete at Thack- 
eray's death on December 24, 1863. People whose 
sentimentalism Thackeray himself would doubtless 
have approved, find significance in the last words which 
Thackeray penned: "And his heart throbbed with an 
exquisite bliss." 

Thackeray's daughter tells us that Roundabout Pa- 
pers constitute a virtual diary of his last, that is, of 
his ripest, his happiest years. There the great-hearted 
man shows clearly that his early buffoonery and near- 
cynicism were at best but a mask. These essays, best 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS i6i 

of all his writings, perhaps, induce a good-night spirit. 
And more and more a reader of these and others of 
his essays and sketches becomes conscious that Thack- 
eray, like Carlyle, yet after his own peculiar fashion, 
was engaged in the great conflict for truth, and for 
genuineness. 

JOHNRUSKIN (1819-1900) 

Chronology 

1819 Born, February 18, in London. Juvenilia. 

1833 Tour of Europe. Tutors. Other tours. 

1836-1843 At Christ Church (College), Oxford. Prizes. 
Illness. Geological studies and writings. De- 
fense of Turner. 1840, introduced to Turner. 

1843 First volume of Modern Painters; others — 1846, 
1856, 1856, i860. Love affairs: wrote King of 
the Golden River (1841) for a Miss Gray, whom 
he married in 1848; marriage annulled in 1854. 

1849 Seven Lamps of Architecture. 1 851-1853, Stones 
of Venice. Textbooks. 1857, Political Economy 
of Art. 1859, The Two Paths. 

i860 Unto This Last in Cornhill. Lectures: 1865, Ses- 
ame and Lilies; Crown of Wild Olive; Ethics of 
the Dust. 1867, Time and Tide. 

1 871 Purchased Brantwood on Coniston Lake. Social 
experiments. 

1878-1884 Slade Professor of Fine Arts, Oxford. 
Whistler episode. Weakness. Friends. 

1900 Died, January 20. Buried at Coniston. 

In these studies we have necessarily maintained 
pretty consistently the attitude of reverence. Our rev- 
erence would probably be more healthy and whole- 
souled, in many cases, if we were aware of the other 



i62 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

estimates of our divinities which have at times been 
freely proclaimed. Not all Americans of about 1870, 
for example, in arranging each his little private gal- 
lery of extraordinary men — not all of these would, 
like Lowell, have placed Emerson in the Hall of Fame; 
some would have shoved him into the adjoining crypt 
of infamy and labeled him fool. And many English- 
men of about the same time, if challenged to produce 
Emerson's counterpart in folly, would have thrust for- 
ward two candidates: one the cranky, crusty Carlyle; 
the other the ribald, wrangling Ruskin. We shall ap- 
preciate Ruskin ultimately all the more if we look 
at him for a moment from this angle. 

To begin with, this fellow Ruskin was always say- 
ing things, always saying them forcibly, and always 
neglecting to determine whether or not they would 
be pleasant to hear. Such a man is bound to create 
awkward situations. Further, instead of exercising 
his volubility in the field of art, where it would have 
been diverting and harmless, this Ruskin kept poking 
into all sorts of things. In his ever- forcible way he 
told peasants that their moral defects were openly 
displayed by their cottage walls and chimneys; small 
towns, that their monumented squares were invisible 
behind the heaps of waste paper and broken bottles 
in their back alleys ; "restorers" of ancient architecture, 
that they were vandals more culpable than Henry VHI 
or the Roundheads; great and prosperous merchants, 
that they were really mere gamblers; loyal soldiers, 
that they existed chiefly to destroy surplus popula- 
tion; the government, that it failed utterly to appre- 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 163 

ciate its true function; political economists, that their 
talk of "supply and demand," "wealth," labor, capital, 
and so on, was but purposeless pother. He also gave 
money broadcast to young authors and artists — few of 
whom came to anything. And he tried experiments 
in manufacturing, in farming, and in education — most 
of which were ludicrous and speedy failures. Not a 
knave, perhaps, this fellow Ruskin; but surely a 
fool! 

What of the sequel? A circle of young artists, the 
Pre-Raphaelites, acting upon Ruskin's theory of art, 
became the most noted of nineteenth century artists. 
Turner, the English painter whom Ruskin may be said 
to have discovered, occupies more space in British 
galleries to-day than perhaps ten other painters put 
together. Long since, architects and others ceased at- 
tempting to "restore" ancient architecture; steadily 
these architects have been approximating Ruskin's 
dominant conceptions of what is honest, appropriate, 
and truly beautiful in architecture. Of his social 
tenets, that concerning war as promoted chiefly by capi- 
talists who either lend money to combatants or manu- 
facture their implements for profit, has often of late 
received striking confirmation. Ruskin's efforts to 
revive the joy of work, moreover, are represented 
to-day in our Arts and Crafts movement and in the 
extension of Vocational Training. The old-age pen- 
sions which he favored have been granted by most 
nations in Europe, and are likely soon to be resorted 
to in America. Social settlements, social-service ac- 
tivities of all sorts, civic and village improvement 



i64 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

societies, the custom of preserving great and strik- 
ing beauties of nature, all, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, are carrying out ideas advanced by Ruskin. 
And though back alleys are, to be sure, still thick with 
paper and bottles; though many cities are still built 
(as he said) "for labor and not for life"; though we 
still dress our productive laborers in mean clothes and 
our soldiers in bright ones (instead of in the black 
which alone, he said, is appropriate to executioners) ; 
though capital and labor are still at odds, and our no- 
tion of wealth still comprehends coin rather than 
happiness, — the sequel is not completed. 

What are the important elements which composed 
this powerful, far-seeing man? Take a nature more 
sensitive than Leigh Hunt's, a mind more compre- 
hensive and more precocious than Macaulay's, a hand 
almost as skilful as Turner's own, an altruism which 
has perhaps been a model for our greatest philan- 
thropists, an insight and a vigor as great as Car- 
lyle's, and a facility of expression greater than Steven- 
son's. Endow this nature with a million and more 
of money, and with an education practically complete 
in natural science and in the fine arts. Then set the 
nature thus endowed in the midst of a nation grip- 
ping the world through its commerce and its manu- 
factures, a nation which gloried in a London and a 
Manchester which few could see for smoke and soot, 
a nation which bayoneted China into furnishing a 
market for British opium. The title of fool was as 
certain to come to him as clouds to the summit of 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 165 

his favorite Mt. Coniston. One who reads him widely, 
moreover, comes to feel that the title of fool is certain 
to be succeeded by that of seer and saint. 

Until about his thirty-fifth year, Ruskin was in- 
terested primarily in art. He had been born and bred 
to love pictures and all beautiful objects. At twenty- 
three he had written upon art, the first volume of 
Modern Painters. But as he went up and down enjoy- 
ing the beauties of landscapes and the works of the 
great masters, he grew troubled over the fact that 
other men seemed not to enjoy these things, and that 
no paintings nor buildings nor ornaments at all com- 
parable in beauty to works of past great masters were 
being produced. His curious, analytic mind set to 
work to determine the cause. At length he concluded 
that the fault lay in men's ideals. He endeavored 
at first to preach along with his doctrine of beauty 
a gospel above that of profits and mechanical effi- 
ciency. Finally, he gave up attempting to teach both, 
and selected for emphasis during the rest of his life 
the doctrines of true happiness and true progress which 
had crystallized in his mind. Unto This Last marks 
the beginning of Ruskin's sociological period. 

No author whom we consider has made more fre- 
quent nor more severe attacks upon the rich, more 
moving representations of the poor. Yet Ruskin, more 
truly even than Thackeray, was born with a golden 
spoon in his mouth. You will scarcely find in Dick- 
ens more pitiful contrasts between the sordid and the 
beautiful, the starving and the surfeited; yet while 



i66 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Dickens suffered the sharpest pangs of poverty and 
wrote fiction, Ruskin, who wrote fact, never felt the 
pinch of poverty. 

Ruskin's father was a wealthy merchant. John, his 
only son, was born in London, February i8, 1819. His 
boyish experiences included much reading of the Bible 
with his mother, and extensive memorizing of passages 
from it; careful and long-continued examination of 
natural objects, such as flowers or an ant-colony in 
his father's garden; and glorious long posting (driv- 
ing) tours over England with his mother and father, 
for the double purpose of taking orders for wine and 
of seeing famous valleys and mountains and, in pri- 
vate houses and public museums, great pictures. He 
never was allowed to look at what his father, himself 
a discriminating critic, considered a bad picture. And 
on Sundays, from no narrow Puritan spirit but as a 
fit form of self-denial, it was the custom in the family 
home to turn favorite pictures face to the wall. 

At four years of age he could read and write; at 
seven he composed numerous stories, and the next year 
wrote endless verses. Tutors in the classics and in 
drawing, and a course interrupted by illness at Ox- 
ford, did something for his education. Since natural 
science and the fine arts were not then subjects of 
University study, his travels over England and the 
Continent, his reading, and his passionate contempla- 
tion of art, of architecture, of plants, and of mineral 
and geological phenomena did much more for his real 
education. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 167 

The scientific significance and the inherent beauty 
of things were one to him. He had no patience with 
the tendency to regard them as distinct. "Oxford 
taught me as much Greek and Latin as she could," 
he afterwards said; "and, though I think that she 
might also have told me that f ritillaries grew in Iffley 
meadow, it was better that she left me to find them 
for myself than that she should have told me, as 
nowadays she would, that the painting on them was 
only to amuse the midges." 

Those juvenile compositions of Ruskin's were of 
course insignificant. Even before he entered Oxford, 
however, he began serious writing. He soon aban- 
doned poetry as a form in which "he could express 
nothing rightly that he had to say." And his prose 
compositions soon came to deal chiefly with art. The 
nom de plume which he adopted is significant — Kata 
Phusin (according to nature) ; it indicates the touch- 
stone which he persistently and intelligently applied 
to all art objects. Turner (J. M. W., Esq.), then still 
living, impressed him more and more as one who 
painted "according to nature." In 1843, Ruskin pub- 
lished a volume maintaining the superiority of mod- 
erns in landscape painting; the title he had selected 
indicated whom the volume treated as chief of the 
moderns — it was Turner and the Ancients; but the 
publishers persuaded him to call it Modern Painters. 
Continuations of this work, making it a comprehensive 
treatise on art, appeared in successive volumes to the 
number of five, the last in i860. It abounds in those 
flights of impassioned prose in which Ruskin sur- 



i68 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

passes De Quincey ; even if his sociological and artistic 
theories are forgotten, these passages in Modern Paint- 
ers and elsewhere are likely to survive. 

The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), ^otes 
on the Construction of Sheep folds (1851), Stones of 
Venice (1853), ^"^ The Political Economy of Art 
(1857) further expressed his theories. It was during 
this period that the Pre-Raphaelites developed, Ruskin 
encouraging them. It was also during this period 
that Ruskin's difficulties as an art-collector became 
painful; the confidence in his judgment was so great 
that any picture which he wished to purchase was 
at once bid up very high, and a picture he did not 
care for could hardly be sold at all. Needless to say, 
all the painters feared him, and more hated him than 
loved him. 

He published technical treatises on Drawing, and 
actually taught classes at a workingmen's college. 
He must have been a discouraging teacher. A pupil 
tells of watching him at work copying a picture in a 
gallery: Ruskin would examine some apparently in- 
significant detail of the picture, such as a thread in 
a dress, for five minutes, and would then swiftly draw 
it on his own canvas. Naturally his paintings, both 
copies and originals, are not in all numerous, and most 
of them are only partially completed; but his best work 
may readily be mistaken for Turner's. 

Ruskin's wife, to whom he had proposed at the 
suggestion of his parents, and whom he married in 
1848, is memorable for us chiefly as the inspiration of 
The King of the Golden River. Ruskin wrote it for 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 169 

her in two sittings in 184 1. In 1854, their marriage 
was annulled, and she later became the wife of the 
painter Millais. 

Soon after this came that complete transformation 
in Ruskin's life already referred to. He had been 
growing ever more sensitive to the hammer-blows 
struck by Carlyle in Sartor, in Heroes, in Chartism, in 
Past and Present. In all his attempts to secure prac- 
tical application of his art teachings, he had been 
met by the same impossible intellectual and indus- 
trial conditions. What Carlyle called a "divine rage 
against falsity" at length isolated Ruskin completely. 
For a time, he says ironically, he felt such a peace 
as might one "buried ... in a tuft of grass on a 
battlefield wet with blood." Finally he acted upon 
the thought which for ten years had been taking deep 
root in his mind, the thought quoted at the begin- 
ning of our treatment of Carlyle: "It is no time for 
the idleness of metaphysics or the entertainment of 
the arts." And in i860 his newest convictions began 
to appear in the new Cornhill Magazine, of which his 
friend, Thackeray, was the kind-hearted editor. The 
first three papers, startling and excoriating to con- 
temporaries, raised such a hubbub of disapproval that 
Thackeray had to tell Ruskin that he could publish but 
one more. The four are known as Unto This Last. 
A sequel, now known as Munera Pulveris, was started 
in Frase/s Magazine in 1862 ; it too had to be discon- 
tinued, this time at the command of the curator of 
subscriptions, the publisher. 

Ruskin, the indefatigable, published both in book 



170 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

form, duly prefaced and annotated. And in lectures 
up and down the country, in The Two Paths (1859), 
Sesame and Lilies (1865), A Crown of Wild Olive 
(1866), Ethics of the Dust (1866), Time and Tide 
( 1867), and Fors Clavigera ( 1871 ), he proclaimed and 
reiterated his principles. 

The excellence of a product, said Ruskin, is to be 
judged less by the product itself than by its influence 
on the life of its producers; wealth, he maintained, 
is significant only as it develops human life; and, 
further, not competition but helpfulness, cooperation, 
contains the secret of life. 

Of the practical applications of these principles 
which he proposed may be mentioned a system of na- 
tional education, the thorough organization of labor, 
the establishment of government training schools, the 
provision of old-age pensions, and the maintenance 
of decent homes for the working-classes. These 
were the things once howled out of the magazines. It 
is well known how we regard each to-day, and what 
credit we should assign to Ruskin in consequence. Rus- 
kin also spent great sums of money in promoting agri- 
cultural, industrial, and artistic experiments. His 
patrimony of at least a million dollars was entirely 
dispersed by him in these ways. The artist, the social 
theorist, thus became the practical social reformer. 

In 1878 he was made (the first) Slade Professor of 
Fine Arts at Oxford. The same year he made some 
contemptuous reference to Whistler. That eccentric 
painter brought action for libel, and was at length 
awarded damages of one farthing. Ruskin's costs, 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 171 

necessarily very great, were, like Newman's under 
similar circumstances, defrayed by popular subscrip- 
tion. It appears that the party willing to count Rus- 
kin as a seer was a very considerable one. 

But the end of Ruskin's active, stormy life was ap- 
proaching. Broken in health, bent by the still clam- 
orous calumny of those who opposed him, Ruskin 
worked on at the duties of his professorship, lectur- 
ing, revising his art teaching, even preparing guide- 
books to foreign cities of prime importance in art. 
At length, however, in 1884, when the authorities de- 
nied his drawing school some needed funds but appro- 
priated funds for a laboratory where vivisection was 
to be practised, Ruskin resigned. 

He withdrew to his estate, Brantwood, on the shore 
of Lake Coniston, and the years passed often pain- 
fully but uneventfully. Some autobiographical writ- 
ing which he undertook, Praeterita Dilecta, was never 
completed. Even young people may remember the 
newspaper headlines announcing his death on Janu- 
ary 20, 1900, and his burial in the village cemetery 
of Coniston, the offer of a grave in Westminster hav- 
ing been declined. 

It is almost a generation since the last of his essays 
was published, since the last of what Carlyle called 
his "fierce lightning bolts" was hurled. The flashes 
and the detonations of the successive bolts still re- 
flect and reverberate. Their mission seems surely to 
have been electrifying, not annihilating, as so many 
men then supposed. Carlyle' s practical teaching was 



172 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

depressing, destructive; Emerson's was uplifting, but 
for the most part not immediately practicable; this 
man's was constructive, hopeful, power-engendering. 
It is hard to say how much of Economics and So- 
ciology as they are now studied and being put into 
practise has been contributed by Ruskin, precisely how 
much of modern conceptions of art and architecture 
we owe to him. Certainly, as students of the essay 
and as participants in active life, we cannot easily 
know too much of John Ruskin. 

MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888) 
Chronology 
1822 Born, December 24, at Laleham; son of Dr. 

Thomas Arnold, later (1828 ff.) headmaster of 

Rugby. 
1837-1841 Student at Rugby. Prizes. 
1841-1845 Student at Balliol College, Oxford. Prizes. 

Fellow at Oriel, 1845. 
1847 Private secretary to Marquis of Lansdowne, ad- 
ministrator of public instruction. Arnold later 

(1851) made inspector of schools. 
1849 ^^^ Strayed Reveler and Other Poems — by Arnold, 

Clough, and others. 
1852 Empedodes on ^tna. 1853, Poems. 1855, Poems. 
1857-1867 Professor of Poetry at Oxford. 
1861-1862 0» Translating Homer — lectures. 1867, On 

the Study of Celtic Literature. 1865, Essays in 

Criticism. 
1869 Culture and Anarchy. 1875, Literature and Dogma. 
1883 Pensioned by Gladstone. Lecture tour in America. 
1888 Sudden death at Liverpool, April 15. 

Matthew Arnold was the eldest son of the famous 
Dr. Thomas Arnold, long the headmaster of the great 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 173 

English school at Rugby. Matthew Arnold received 
his school education at Rugby, where he was a bril- 
liant scholar. At Balliol College, Oxford, he likewise 
made a brilliant record. Soon after his graduation 
he became an inspector of schools, and throughout his 
life he expended a great part of his energy and his 
intellect on the humdrum tasks which this office im- 
posed upon him. 

The late evenings he spent upon the more congenial 
task of writing, and from the time when his first 
poems appeared in 1849 until his Discourses in Amer- 
ica were published in 1885, he produced a vast amount 
of carefully wrought, exquisite verse, and of thought- 
ful, memorable criticism. 

His skill as a poet secured him in middle age the 
office of Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Some of his 
lectures in this capacity, notably those On Translating 
Homer and On the Study of Celtic Literature, are 
among the most enduring critical works in the Eng- 
lish language. In 1883 England recognized his at- 
tainments by giving him a pension. He visited Amer- 
ica twice, in 1883 and again in 1886. Problems of 
literature, of politics, and of religion engaged his 
most earnest and enthusiastic efforts. His death from 
heart disease came suddenly at Liverpool in April, 
1888. Such is the simple story of his outward life. 

If Matthew Arnold came early in a study of nine- 
teenth century essayists, one would almost despair of 
being able to interest inexperienced readers in him. 
He had an unromantic life — inspector of schools, one- 



174 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

time Professor at Oxford, poet, lecturer, controver- 
sialist, essayist. His feats as a swimmer constitute 
the only incident in his biography which may certainly 
be calculated to make people in general really look 
alive. And for students or readers who still require 
of an author that he slap them on the back or nudge 
them in the ribs or grip them by the arm or by trap 
or lasso seize and hold them — for such persons Mat- 
thew Arnold will be as one who passes by on the 
other side. There is little cut and thrust, little draw- 
ing of the long bow of thought, little of enticing 
tintinnabulation with him. He is less startling than 
Carlyle, less musical and less passionate than Ruskin, 
more intelligible — and duller — than Emerson. 

Yet Matthew Arnold rightly makes a fourth with 
the three superb essayists and thinkers of the cen- 
tury. And those who know and have proved the de- 
lights of thinking as they read, the delights of per- 
ceiving wholeness and fitness in the structure and ex- 
pression of an essay, and the delights of feeling good 
sense, good temper, and wisdom reflected from pages 
of print, will listen eagerly when Arnold sits before 
them talking. 

Matthew Arnold was a professional critic. He 
adopted the role as deliberately and as heroically as 
Ruskin adopted that of social reformer, as Carlyle 
and Emerson adopted that of preacher in the vast 
church of letters. Arnold's purpose in so doing was 
as broad and as high as that of any of these other 
men. He was a critic of poetry, of books. But he 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS i75 

was more than that. He was a critic of current po- 
litical thought, of current religious and theological 
thought, of the temper and spirit and ideals of nine- 
teenth century Englishmen — including Americans. We 
shall do well to examine, first, a sample of his criti- 
cism ; second, his purpose as a critic ; and, third, some 
of the important principles which in his work as a 
critic he strove to inculcate. 

As a sample of his criticism let us take his analysis 
of Emerson. It is from a lecture delivered in Bos- 
ton. He has related how to him as a student at Ox- 
ford the voice of Newman preaching there in St. 
Mary's Church, the voice of Carlyle still fresh and 
clarion-like, the voice of Goethe speaking through Car- 
lyle^ — all three came powerful, penetrating, inspiring. 
Arnold continues: 

"And besides those voices, there came to us in that old 
Oxford time a voice also from this side of the Atlantic, — a 
clear and pure voice, which for my ear, at any rate, brought 
a strain as new, and moving, and unforgettable, as the strain 
of Newman, or Carlyle, or Goethe. Mr. Lowell has well de- 
scribed the apparition of Emerson to your young generation 
here in that distant time of which I am speaking, and of his 
workings upon them. He was your Newman, your man of 
soul and genius, visible to you in the flesh, speaking to your 
bodily ears, a present object for your heart and imagination. 
That is surely the most potent of all influences ! nothing can 
come up to it. To us at Oxford Emerson was but a voice 
speaking from three thousand miles away. But so well he 
spoke, that from that time forth Boston Bay and Concord 
were names invested to my ear with a sentiment akin to that 
which invests for me the names of Oxford and of Weimar; 



176 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

and snatches of Emerson's strain fixed themselves in my mind 
as imperishably as any of the eloquent words which I have 
been just now quoting. 'Then dies the man in you; then once 
more perish the buds of art, poetry, and science, as they 
have died already in a thousand thousand men . . . and not 
pinched in a corner, not cowards, fleeing before a revolution, 
but redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be noble 
clay plastic under the Almighty effort, let us advance and 
advance on chaos and the dark.' These lofty sentences of 
Emerson, and a hundred others of like strain, I never have 
lost out of my memory; I never can lose them." 

Arnold then points out that Emerson will not be 
known to remote posterity as a poet, nor as a great 
man of letters at all, nor even as a philosopher. Con- 
tinuing, he says : 

"And now I think I have cleared the ground. I have given 
up to envious Time as much of Emerson as Time can fairly 
expect ever to obtain. We have not in Emerson a great poet, 
a great writer, a great philosophy maker. His relation to us 
is not that of one of those personages; yet it is a relation of, 
I think, even superior importance. His relation to us is more 
like that of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Marcus 
Aurelius is not a great writer, a great philosophy maker; he 
is the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit. 
Emerson is the same. He is the friend and aider of those 
who would live in the spirit. All the points in thinking which 
are necessary for this purpose he takes; but he does not 
combine them into a system, or present them as a regular 
philosophy. Combined in a system by a man with the 
requisite talent for this kind of thing, they would be less 
useful than as Emerson gives them to us ; and the man with 
the talent so to systematize them would be less impressive 
than Emerson." 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS I77 

He goes on to point out that Emerson's teaching is 
characterized by hope, by optimism, and that these 
quaHties justify one in considering Emerson greater 
even than Carlyle. He concludes : 

"You cannot prize him too much, nor heed him too dili- 
gently. He has lessons for both the branches of our race. I 
figure him to my mind as physical upon earth still, as still 
standing here by Boston Bay, or at his own Concord, in his 
habit as he lived, but of heightened stature and shining fea- 
ture, with one hand stretched out toward the East, to our 
laden and laboring England; the other towards the ever- 
growing West, to his own dearly-loved America, — 'great, in- 
telligent, sensual, avaricious America.' To us he shows for 
guidance his lucid freedom, his cheerfulness and hope; to 
you his dignity, delicacy, serenity, elevation." 

Perhaps Arnold's most noted literary criticism is 
contained in three lectures delivered at Oxford On 
Translating Homer. In these lectures, in cogent, con- 
crete, and convincing English, he emphasizes points 
which at once exalt the poetry and art of Homer, 
and ennoble the task of a careful translator of Homer. 
This essay and other essays must be read to be appre- 
ciated for the criticism which they include. 

In all this criticism — of Emerson, of translators, of 
Homer, of Marcus Aurelius, and of all the other topics 
which he treats — Arnold was fulfilling a purpose. 
What was the conception of criticism which this man 
had and which made him even forsake the career of 
a poet for that of a critic? We get a clear answer 
in his essay on The Function of Criticism. One may 
dwell upon this because to most people criticism — of 



178 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

themes, of books, the negative or unprogressive atti- 
tude toward a new movement — seems pedantic, dila- 
tory, unprofitable. Here are some brief statements of 
Arnold's conception of criticism : 

"Its business is, as I have said, simply to know the best that 
is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making 
this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its 
business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability ; 
... its business is to keep man from a self-satisfaction which 
is retarding and vulgarizing, to lead him towards perfection 
by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, 
and the absolute beauty and fitness of things. 

"Judging is often spoken of as the critic's one business, 
and so in some sense it is; but the judgment which almost 
insensibly forms itself in a fair and clear mind, along with 
fresh knowledge, is the valuable one ; and thus knowledge and 
ever fresh knowledge, must be the critic's great concern for 
himself; and it is by communicating fresh knowledge, and 
letting his own judgment pass along with it — but insensibly, 
and in the second place, not the first, as a sort of companion 
and clue, not as an abstract law-giver — that he will generally 
do most good to his readers." 

Arnold also points out that it is the duty of criti- 
cism to resist the establishment of institutions with 
pretentious but misguided, ill-balanced purposes — "the 
grand name without the grand thing," "to be per- 
petually dissatisfied with these works, while they per- 
petually fall short of a high and perfect ideal." The 
most piercing remark in the essay, moreover, is this: 
"let us in the meanwhile rather endeavor that in 
twenty years' time it may, in English literature, be an 
objection to a proposition that it is absurd. That," 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS I79 

he continues, with a sarcasm pardonable, it would 
seem, to this day, "that will be a change so vast that 
the imagination almost fails to grasp it." 

One other passage in this essay strikingly illus- 
trates the need and the function of criticism as Ar- 
nold conceived them when he wrote. You will note 
something of both Carlyle and Ruskin in the thought : 

"Mr. Adderley says to the Warwickshire farmers: 'Talk 
of the improvement of breed ! Why, the race we ourselves 
represent, the men and women, the old Anglo-Saxon race, 
are the best breed in the whole world. . . . The absence of 
a too enervating climate, too unclouded skies, and a too 
luxurious nature, has produced so vigorous a race of people, 
and has rendered us so superior to all the world.' 

"Mr. Roebuck says to the Sheffield cutlers : T look around 
me and ask what is the state of England? Is not property 
safe? Is not every man able to say what he likes? Can 
you not walk from one end of England to the other in per- 
fect security? I ask you whether, the world over or in past 
history, there is anything like it? Nothing. I pray that 
our unrivalled happiness may last.' 

"Now obviously there is a peril for poor human nature 
in words and thoughts of such exuberant self-satisfaction, 
until we find ourselves safe in the streets of the Celestial 
City. . . . But let criticism ... in the most candid spirit 
. . . confront with our dithyramb this paragraph on which 
I stumbled in a newspaper immediately after reading Mr. 
Roebuck : 'A shocking child murder has just been com- 
mitted at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the work- 
house on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. 
The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly 
Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.' 

"Nothing but that; but, in juxtaposition with the absolute 
eulogies of Mr. Adderley and Mr. Roebuck, how eloquent, 



i8o ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

how suggestive are those few lines ! 'Our old Anglo-Saxon 
breed, the best in the whole world!' — how much that is 
harsh and ill-favored there is in this best! . . . 'our un- 
rivalled happiness;' — what an element of grimness, bareness, 
and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it ; the workhouse, 
the dismal Mapperly Hills, — how dismal those who have 
seen them will remember; — the gloom, the smoke, the cold, 
the strangled illegitimate child ! 'I ask you whether the 
world over or in past history there is anything like it?' It 
may be so, one is inclined to answer; but at any rate, in 
that case, the world is very much to be pitied. And the 
final touch, — short, bleak and inhuman : Wragg is in custody. 
The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled happiness; or 
shall I say, the superfluous Christian name lopped off by 
the straightforward vigor of our old Anglo-Saxon breed? 
There is profit for the spirit in such contrasts as this; criti- 
cism serves the cause of perfection by establishing them. 
. . . Mr. Roebuck will have a poor opinion of an adversary 
who replies to his defiant songs of triumph only by murmur- 
ing under his breath, Wragg is in custody; but in no other 
way will these songs of triumph be induced gradually to 
moderate themselves, to get rid of what in them is excessive 
and offensive, and to fall into a softer and truer key." 

It is not that Arnold disapproved of enthusiasm, of 
loyalty to country, of reasonable content with one's 
surroundings. It is that he felt the need of poise, of 
clearness of vision, of "knowledge and ever fresh 
knowledge." And insistence upon these things, the 
furnishing of knowledge, the diffusion of cloud and 
haze, the establishment of poise, was, he considered, 
the high function of criticism, the work of the critic. 

And now for some of the principal ideas empha- 
sized by the critic Arnold in his attempt to improve 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS "iSi 

mankind by extending knowledge and by insisting upon 
reason and balance in all things. Two terms, both 
familiar to-day, and one, at least, now far from defi- 
nite in meaning, are frequently on Arnold's lips. They 
are "Philistine" (or Philistinism) and "Culture." Let 
us understand each term and the relationship of culture 
to Philistinism. 

It is well known who were the original Philistines : 
the enemies of the Children of Israel, the opponents 
of the Lord's chosen people. Goliath, boasting of his 
strength, flourishing his mighty weapons, and defying 
the Israelites to advance, is their chief prototype. The 
word had been applied by German students to persons 
not members of the University, hence not members 
of the enlightened class. Carlyle had pitched upon the 
word as designating bore or dullard or provincial. 
But it did not really enter the vocabulary of English 
people until Arnold seized it and dwelt upon it in 
his essay on Heine. He says : 

"Philistinism ! — we have not the expression in English. 
Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of 
the thing. At Soli, I imagine, they did not talk of solecisms ; 
and here, at the very headquarters of Goliath, nobody talks 
of Philistinism. The French have adopted the term epicier 
(grocer), to designate the sort of being whom the Germans 
designate by, the term Philistine; but the French term, — be- 
sides that it casts a slur upon a respectable class composed 
of living and susceptible members, while the original Philis- 
tines are dead and buried long ago, — is really, I think, in 
itself much less apt and expressive than the German term. 
Efforts have been made to obtain in English some term 
equivalent to Philister or epicier; Mr. Carlyle has made sev- 



i82 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

eral such efforts : 'respectability with its thousand gigs,' he 
says ; — well, the occupant of every one of these gigs is, Mr. 
Carlyle means, a Philistine. However, the word respectable 
is far too valuable a word to be thus perverted from its 
proper meaning; if the English are ever to have a word for 
the thing we are speaking of, — and so prodigious are the 
changes which the modern spirit is introducing, that even 
we English shall perhaps one day come to want such a word, 
— I think we had much better take the term Philistine itself. 
"Philistine must have originally meant in the mind of those 
who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened 
opponent of the chosen people, of the children of light. . . . 
This explains . . . the detestation which Heine had for the 
English : T might settle in England,' he says, in his exile, 
'if it were not that I should find there two things, coal-smoke 
and Englishmen; I cannot abide either.' What he hated in 
the English was the 'achtbrittische Beschranktheit,' as he 
calls it, — the genuine British narrowness. In truth the Eng- 
lish, profoundly as they have modified the old Middle Age 
order, great as is the liberty which they have secured for 
themselves, have in all their changes proceeded, to use a 
familiar expression, by the rule of thumb; what was intol- 
erably inconvenient to them they have suppressed, and as 
they have suppressed it, not because it was irrational, but 
because it was practically inconvenient, they have seldom in 
suppressing it appealed to reason, but always, if possible, to 
some precedent, or form, or letter, which served as a con- 
venient instrument for their purpose, and which saved them 
from the necessity of recurring to general principles. They 
have thus become, in a certain sense, of all people the most 
inaccessible to ideas and the most impatient of them; inac- 
cessible to them, because of their want of familiarity with 
them; and impatient of them because they have got on so 
well without them, that they despise those who, not having 
got on as well as themselves, still make a fuss for what 
they themselves have done so well without. But there has 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 183 

certainly followed from hence, in this country, somewhat of 
a general depression of pure intelligence." 

The great virtue of the Elizabethan age, the secret 
of its marvelous progress, says Arnold, was "its ac- 
cessibility to ideas," its lack of Philistinism; the great 
defect of the nineteenth century, he says, the explana- 
tion of the ultimate failure of Wordsworth, of Shelley, 
of Scott, to attain each his full measure of greatness, 
was the prevalence of Philistinism. The smug sat- 
isfaction which points with pride to attainments of the 
present and disregards its failures, which assumes 
or approximates a self-satisfaction appropriate only 
in the Celestial City, this, says Arnold, is Philistinism. 

And how is Philistinism to be cured? How is 
Goliath to be silenced and put out of the way? By 
sling and pebbles, by methodical, well-poised Culture. 
The word has tended to degenerate. Let us see how 
Arnold used it. His most careful definition of it, his 
most extended application of culture as a remedy is 
contained in his series of essays called Culture and 
Anarchy. Here he first explains what culture is not : 

"In one of his speeches a short time ago, that fine speaker 
and famous Liberal, Mr. Bright, took occasion to have a 
fling at the friends and preachers of culture. 'People who 
talk about what they call culture!' said he contemptuously; 
'by which they mean a smattering of the two dead languages 
of Greek and Latin.' And he went on to remark, in a strain 
with which modern speakers and writers have made us very 
familiar, how poor a thing this culture is, how little good it 
can do to the world, and how absurd it is for its possessors 
to set much store by it. . . . 



i84 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

"The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smat- 
tering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by 
nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of 
sheer vanity and ignorance or else as an engine of social and 
class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, 
from other people who have not got it. No serious man 
would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, 
at all." 

Arnold later defines culture as characterized by an 
effort to see and learn what reason and the will of God 
dictate, and the endeavor to make this prevail. With 
greater concreteness he writes : 

"The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture 
as the great help out of our present difficulties, culture being 
a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to 
know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best 
which has been thought and said in the world; and through 
this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought 
upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow 
staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a 
virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the 
mischief of following them mechanically." 

The things which culture of this sort aims to pro- 
duce and will produce he finds expressed in a phrase 
of Jonathan Swift's, — "the two noblest of things, 
sweetness and light." These things, by the steady 
pursuit of true culture, by a constant striving to learn, 
by open-mindedness toward all things, and by avoid- 
ance of bigotry in literature, in politics, in religion, 
mankind may procure for itself. Any other aim, the 
pursuit of any other means, according to Arnold, leads 
to Anarchy, to despair and death. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 185 

Arnold saw at work in modern times a tendency 
which would nobly transform the world. Listen to 
his definition of this modern spirit. In it one recog- 
nizes the truth of the definition and also the extent 
to which Arnold's theories encourage such a spirit. 

"Modern times find themselves with an immense system of 
institutions, established facts, accredited dogmas, customs, 
rules, which have come to them from times not modern. 
In this system their life has to be carried forward; yet they 
have a sense that this system is not of their own creation, 
that it by no means corresponds exactly with the wants of 
their actual life, that, for them, it is customary, not rational. 
The awakening of this sense is the awakening of the modern 
spirit." 

Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, and Ruskin: all were ex- 
ponents of this modern spirit; of them all none saw 
his object more clearly nor fought for it more con- 
sistently than Arnold. 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894) 
Chronology 

1850 Born, November 13, in Edinburgh, descendant of 
lighthouse engineers. Mother delicate, but with 
taste for letters. Illness. Play, little schooling; 
private tutors; lighthouse tours. 

1867 Entered Edinburgh University. Idler and truant. 
Reading and writing. 

1871 Received a Society Medal for paper on improve- 
ment in lighthouse apparatus. Forsook engi- 
neering; studied law. 

1876 Tour of Belgium with Sir Walter Simpson. 

1878 Month at Monastier and walk through mountains 
to Florae. Published An Inland Voyage and 
Travels With a Donkey. 



i86 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

1876 ff. Essays in Cornhill. 1877 ff., stories. 

1879 Followed Mrs. Osbourne from France to Cali- 

fornia. 

1880 Married Mrs. Osbourne. Illness. Hard work. To 

Scotland. Virginihus Puerisque, collection of pe- 
riodical essays. Treasure Island, first public suc- 
cess. Stories, novels, plays. 

1887 Memories and Portraits. Went to Adirondacks, 
Saranac Lake. 

1888-1889 Yachting trip in South Seas. Purchased 
Vailima, Samoa. 

1890 Established household at Vailima. Tusitala. Hard 
work. 

1892 Across the Plains. Dictation of St. Ives. Weir of 
Hermiston. 

1894 Sudden death, apoplexy, December 4. Burial on 
Mt. Vaea. 

Robert Louis Stevenson : delicate descendant of 
sturdy, pious, Scotch lighthouse engineers; advocate 
by profession, but writer by nature and by trade; to 
whom the rigorous Scotch climate was lovely but 
fatal, and who spat blood far too readily to be long 
comfortable anywhere; his own severest critic, pain- 
fully developing, rewriting, and reviewing all that he 
wrote; poet, novelist, short-story writer, critic, essay- 
ist; wanderer over the face of the earth, struggler 
against poverty, — yet our greatest modern apostle of 
all noble childlikeness and of all manly whole-souled 
cheerfulness; buried, as he wished, on a mountain- 
top in the Samoan wilderness, with these words (now, 
perhaps, covered deep with vegetation) over his grave : 

"Glad did I live, and gladly die; 
And I laid me down with a will." 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 187 

No romance produced by this staunch advocate of ro- 
mance exceeds in power the vivid realism of his own 
life. 

To one who visits Edinburgh, where Robert Louis 
Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850, it appears 
that a very slight inherited tendency toward romance 
would suffice in that noble city. Men must have been 
still living, in Stevenson's boyhood, who had person- 
ally known Walter Scott. In one direction from the 
city, a short walk for a boy and his father, was the 
seaport of Leith, with its fishing-boats, its maritime 
population, and the vast stream of the Forth River 
ebbing and flowing with the North Sea tides. In other 
directions were hills and vales and lochs and burns 
famous in Scotch history — ^Melrose, Dunfermline, and 
Stirling. At one end, the lower end, of the great 
ridge which divides the city into two parts, to-day 
as then one sees Holyrood Palace, bare, mediaeval, and 
forbidding, its Gothic chapel roofless and paved with 
graves, Mary Queen of Scots' great sin and all the 
suffering brought by it upon Scotland resting upon 
the Palace like a deep shadow even in the brightest 
sunshine; on the cliff above Holyrood Palace, — the 
bare, dark, treeless, rock shelved only here and there 
with grass, — climbing past Jennie Deans' cottage one 
arrives at Arthur's Seat, glorious for outlook and 
hoary with traditions; then up the street from Holy- 
rood Palace, along the top of the great ridge, one 
passes the house of John Knox, the Scottish Houses of 
Parliament (their prestige long since transferred to 



i88 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

London), the site of the old Tolbooth or prison ("the 
heart of Midlothian"), and the Church of St. Giles 
where Jennie Deans asserted the inviolability of 
Scotch Presbyterianism by using the envoy of the Eng- 
lish Archbishop as a target and her folding-stool as 
a missile; on up the street one comes to where the 
ridge terminates in a mighty promontory crowned by 
a fortress — the Castle. From all parts of the city 
its battlements are the dominant object, and every 
day at noon young and old look up to it to catch sight 
of the pufif of smoke and hear the belated roar by 
which a cannon informs them that it is high noon, 
that the King still lives, and Scotland still is free. 

And Stevenson was not dependent for romantic nur- 
ture on these immediate surroundings, all of which 
he loved and has gratefully celebrated in his works. 
He made with his father tours of inspection to the 
lighthouses of northern Great Britain — to Little Ross 
lighthouse which his father had built, to the thirty 
or more lighthouses which an uncle had built, and the 
twenty- four more difficult ones erected by his grand- 
father — one of them the Bell Rock lighthouse, where 
in a single year before its erection seventy sail were 
wrecked, and where in all the time since its erec- 
tion not a single wreck has occurred. 

Among the influences which formed Stevenson note 
further a well-stocked and much-read home library, 
a mother who had passed on to Stevenson not only a 
weak constitution but also a keen appreciation of lit- 
erature and an atmosphere of orthodoxy in reli- 
gion. All these, and a great deal more not accounted 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 189 

for by either environment or heredity, fairly sing to 
you from the pages, chiefly and most clearly, perhaps, 
from the essays, written by this zest-giving man. 

Stevenson did not set out to be a writer. The only 
son of so brilliant a house of engineers had to attempt 
the engineering profession first. After graduating 
from Edinburgh University, he did attempt it. He 
even won a Medal from the Edinburgh Society of Arts 
for a masterful paper on the improvement of light- 
house apparatus. The outdoor activities of the pro- 
fession pleased him. But the indoor ones, the draft- 
ing and the reckoning, almost killed him — ^he was al- 
ready pretty much what he later called himself, a 
"complication of cough and bones." And he knew 
where his nature would find the expression it craved. 
It was not in engineering. 

As a schoolboy it was his custom, so he tells us, 
to carry everywhere two books — one to read, one to 
write in. Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Defoe, Haw- 
thorne, Montaigne, even German writers, he would 
in turn read and imitate ; in his modest way, he called 
it "playing the sedulous ape," That for him, the suc- 
cessful imitation, the striving, the expression of him- 
self, that was fun, it was living. 

But there was no recognized profession of letters. 
It seemed to his earnest Scotch parents as a profes- 
sion of canoeing or trout-fishing, or sunset-gazing 
might seem to us. It was determined that he should 
study law. And in 1875 he was admitted to the bar. 
He must have been an odd sight among the black- 
gowned advocates waiting for clients at the Edin- 



I90 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

burgh courts, this gaunt, stooping, great-eyed fellow, 
his gown flecked with cigarette ashes, and his face 
reflecting his desire to be off and away from it all. 

In 1876 he did get away to make a canoeing tour 
of Belgium and France with Sir Walter Simpson ; and 
if you want an experience better than taking the trip 
yourself, read his An Inland Voyage. Two years 
later he made a tour through the mountains of Brit- 
tany, alone except for the jackass, Modestine, who 
carried his pack; you may enjoy this adulterated soli- 
tude of Stevenson's in his Travels with a Donkey. 

These are the beginning. They really consist of 
essays. And in Virginibus Pnerisque, Familiar Stud- 
ies of Men and Books, and Memories and Portraits 
you may read other products of this period which 
first appeared in the Cornhill Magazine and elsewhere. 

Some stories followed, also a play {Deacon Brodie, 
in collaboration with the poet and editor, W. E. Hen- 
ley) ; for Stevenson, as you see in A Penny Plain and 
Twopence Colored, was subject to the glamor of the 
theater. At the same time he was writing Lay Morals, 
a treatise on ethics; for he had an intensely serious 
side. As yet he had not caught the public. He was 
at this time experiencing the pinch of poverty, as well 
as the sufferings of invalidism and of mere author- 
ship. 

And his testing time was not ended. He fell in 
love. The lady was already married — not in the way 
that is ratified in heaven, so the sequel clearly shows, 
but nevertheless married. She returned from France, 
where Stevenson had met her, to California to secure 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS 191 

a divorce. Stevenson followed her. Naturally his 
strict parents did not heartily approve. It was no 
errand to be financed by Scotch Presbyterians. Steven- 
son consequently shipped to New York in the steerage, 
and crossed the United States in an emigrant train — ■ 
one tin basin for the ablutions of four, squalling child 
in the next seat, cursing trainmen to herd you like 
sheep ! He endured it all, and gave us later his cheer- 
ful Amateur Emigrants and Across the Plains. 

The effect of his hardships was almost fatal. On 
April 16, 1880, he wrote from San Francisco to his 
friend, Mr. Edmund Gosse: 

"You have not answered my last; and I know you will 
repent when you hear how near I have been to another 
world. For about six weeks I have been in utter doubt; 
it was a toss-up for life or death all that time; but I won 
the toss, sir, and Hades went off once more discomfited. 
This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that I have 
a friendly game with that gentleman. I know he will end 
by cleaning me out; but the rogue is insidious, and the habit 
of that sort of gambling seems to be a part of my nature; 
it was, I suspect, too much indulged in youth ; break your 
children of this tendency, my dear Gosse, from the first. It 
is, when once formed, a habit more fatal than opium — I 
speak, as St. Paul says, like a fool. I have been very sick; 
on the verge of a galloping consumption, cold sweats, pros- 
trating attacks of cough, sinking fits in which I lost the 
power of speech, fever, and all the ugliest circumstances 
of the disease ; and I have cause to bless God, my wife that is 
to be, and one Dr. Bam ford (a name the Muse repels), 
that I have come out of all this, and got my feet once more 
upon a little hilltop, with a fair prospect of life and some 
new desire of living. Yet I did not wish to die, neither; 



192 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

only I felt unable to go on farther with that rough horse- 
play of human life: a man must be pretty well to take the 
business in good part. Yet I felt all the time that I had 
done nothing to entitle me to an honorable discharge; that 
I had taken up many obligations and begun many friendships 
which I had no right to put away from me ; and that for me 
to die was to play the cur and slinking sybarite, and desert 
the colors on the eve of the decisive fight." 

For seven years, with only brief periods of com- 
parative health, he continued (what we call) an in- 
valid, seeking relief now in Scotland at a home given 
him by his reconciled father, now in Switzerland, at 
length in the' Adirondack Mountains, New York. Yet 
at frequent intervals he produced the stories, the 
verses, the essays which we cherish, writings reflect- 
ing only the bravest and staunchest of spirits. Vir- 
ginihus Puerisque, a series of essays, appeared in 1880. 
Treasure Island, 1883, was the first to "catch" the pub- 
lic. His best stories — The Merry Men, Markheim, 
Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and others — were fol- 
lowed, in 1887, by another series of essays — Memories 
and Portraits. With his novel Kidnapped, 1886, his 
position as a writer became established, his income 
consequently at last assured. 

A yachting excursion to the South Seas in 1888- 
1889, a visit to Honolulu, the purchase of an estate 
in Samoa, and his settlement there in 1890 followed. 
Vailima (five rivers), the name given to his estate, 
and Tusitala (teller of tales), the name given him by 
the natives, thus became associated with this frail but 
indomitable author. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY ESSAYISTS i93 

In 1884, he had written to his friend, the poet 
Henley : 

"This pleasant middle age into whose port we are steering 
is quite to my fancy. I would cast anchor here, and go 
ashore for twenty years, and see the manners of the place. 
Youth was a great time, but somewhat fussy. Now in mid- 
dle age (bar lucre) all seems mighty placid. It likes me; I 
spy a little bright cafe in one corner of the port, in front of 
which I now propose we should sit down. There is just 
enough of the bustle of the harbor and no more; and the 
ships are close in, regarding us with stern windows — the ships 
that bring deals from Norway and parrots from the Indies. 
Let us sit down here for twenty years, with a packet of to- 
bacco and a drink, and talk of art and women. By and by, 
the whole city will sink, and the ships too, and the table, and 
we also; but we shall have sat for twenty years, and had a 
fine talk; and by that time, who knows? exhausted the sub- 
ject." 

Just one-half of the period he requested was allowed 
him. His sitting was often among bed-pillows; all 
writing was at length prevented by an attack of 
scrivener's cramp; and even talking, in the ordinary 
sense, was occasionally prevented : St. Ives (posthu- 
mous) was dictated to his amanuensis in deaf and 
dumb language while he was too ill to speak. Yet 
there is no sign of his having begun to "exhaust the 
subject." Weir of Hermiston, upon which he was 
working at the last, is recognized as, so far as it 
goes, the greatest of his novels. 

The rupture of a blood-vessel in his brain brought 
about his sudden death on December 4, 1894. Sixty 
natives cleared a path sufficient for them to carry his 



194 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

body to the place he had designated, a forest-covered 
peak of Mt. Vaea. There on his tomb appears the 
Requiem he had composed: 

"Under the wide and starry sky, 
Dig the grave and let me lie. 
Glad did I live and gladly die, 
And I laid me down with a will. 

"This be the verse you grave for me: 
Here he lies where he longed to be : 
Home is the sailor, home from the sea. 
And the hunter home from the hill." 

The roll of the last three centuries exhibits no name 
more inspiring than Stevenson's. The twentieth cen- 
tury possesses few heritages more valuable than the 
record and the works of this poet, fiction- writer, 
essayist. 



APPENDIX I 

Kinds of Essays 

No rig-id or elaborate classification of Essays seems 
practicable. The terms "subjective" and "objective," 
however, are suggestive, and in the main exclusive 
(cf. pp. IIO-II2 above). The further subdivisions, 
also the relation of essays to other types of literature, 
indicated in the table on page 197, have proved useful. 



196 



APPENDIX 197 

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 

LYRIC POETRY 

ESSAYS 

Chiefli/ Subjective Chiefly Objective 

1. Exhibiting mere exuber- 
ance of thought and 
spirit. 

2. Exhibiting deliber- 
ate effort to entertain 
by displaying self. 

3. Involving treatment 
of some subject with 
simply "personal 
touches." 

4. Concerned primarily 
with a (recent) book, 
a recent occurrence, or 
a prevailing conception. 

5. Constituting an in- 
dependent expression of 
the author's serious 
"message." 

HISTORY, PHI- 
LOSOPHY (extended, 
comprehensive, existing 
solely for sake of topic 
treated). 
FICTION. 



APPENDIX II 

Minor English Essayists 
Below will be found brief characterizations of the 
English essayists who are not treated in the preceding 
pages, yet whose essay-writings are frequently met 
with. In each of the four groups, which are arranged 
chronologically by centuries, the individuals are ar- 
ranged alphabetically. 

Seventeenth Century 

Browne, Sir Thomas (1605-1682), physician and 
scholar; essay-like passages occur in his Religio 
Medici, 1643, ^^^ Burial, 1658, and Vulgar Errors 
{Pseudodoxia Epideinica), 1646. 

Defoe, Daniel (1661 ?-i73i), author of Robinson 
Crusoe, journalist and novelist; in his Review, 1704- 
1713, and elsewhere pubHshed many virtual essays. 

Dryden, John (i 631- 1700), poet and dramatist; 
his many prose prefaces and introductions, chiefly 
critical and often bitterly controversial, are sometimes 
called essays. 

Earle, John (i6oi?-i665). Bishop of Salisbury, 
poet and divine, wrote Micromosgraphie, or a Piece of 
the World Discovered in Essayes and Characters, 
1628. 

Felltham, Owen (i6o2?-i668), v^voit Resolves, 
Divine, Morall, Politicall, 1620, a series of moral es- 

198 



APPENDIX 199 

says bearing some resemblance to Bacon's Essays, 
which were frequently enlarged and reissued. 

FoRDE, Thomas (fl. 1660), in The Times Anat- 
omized in Several Characters, 1647, reflects influence 
of Montaigne. 

Fuller, Thomas (1608-1661), divine and histo- 
rian; his Good Thoughts in Bad Times, 1645, and His- 
tory of the Worthies in England, 1662, contain sec- 
tions resembling essays. 

Hyde, Edward (1609- 1674), Earl of Clarendon, 
historian of the Rebellion or Civil War, 1702- 1704, 
wrote also Rejections upon Several Christian Duties, 
Divine and Moral, by Way of Essays, 1727. 

Osborne, Francis (i 593-1659), in his Advice to a 
Son and Miscellany of Sundry Essays, Paradoxes, 
Etc., dimly deflects Bacon. 

Overbury, Sir Thomas (1581-1613), poet and 
courtier ; prose Characters were appended to his poem, 
The Wife, 16 14. 

Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), pamphleteer and 
satirist, contributed to The Tatlcr, The Examiner, and 
other periodicals, and wrote various satirical and con- 
troversial pamphlets more or less like essays. 

Temple, Sir William (1628- 1699), diplomatist, 
gardener, and author; published extended and rather 
pedantic Essays, 1680, 1692. 

Eighteenth Century 

BuDGELL, Eustace (1686-1737), a cousin of Jo- 
seph Addison, and a contributor to The Spectator. 



200 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Chesterfield (Philip Dormer), Lord (1694- 
i772>)y author of Letters to His Son, contributed es- 
says to periodicals. 

Cobbett, William (1762- 1835), politician and 
agriculturist ; published periodicals in both the United 
States and England. His Rural Rides, 1830, reports 
a series of political tours through England. 

Cowper, William (1731-1800), poet and trans- 
lator; contributed a few essays to The Connoisseur, 
1756, and other periodicals. 

Fielding, Henry (1707-1754), novelist; wrote 
imitations of The Spectator for The Champion, 1741, 
and other periodicals. 

Franklin, Benjamin (1706-1790), diplomat and 
scientist; published imitations of Spectator papers in 
The New England C our ant, in The Pennsylvania Ga- 
zette, 1729 fif., and in Poor Richard's Almanac, ly^^ H. 

Gibbon, Edward (1737- 1794), historian; wrote 
miscellaneous essays (published, 1796). 

Hume, David (1711-1776), philosopher and histo- 
rian; author of various essays, chiefly philosophical, 
1741 ff. 

"Junius," signature attached to a series of seventy 
Letters, 1769- 1772, in the London Public Advertiser, 
dealing boldly with current political conditions. The 
identity of Junius has never been established. 

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley (1689- 1762), ^^ 
her various Letters included passages sometimes 
classed as essays. 

Paine, Thomas ( 1737- 1809), radicalist and pamph- 
leteer. 



APPENDIX 20I 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723-1792), painter, is re- 
membered among essayists for his Discourses on Art. 

Richardson, Samuel (i 689-1 761), novelist, con- 
tributed to The Rambler. 

Smith, Adam (1723- 1790), political economist, 
preceded and followed his Wealth of Nations, 1776, 
with learned essays on various subjects. 

Sterne, Laurence (171 3- 1768), novelist. 

Walpole, Horace (171 7- 1797), wit and letter- 
writer, contributed papers to The World, 1753. 

Warton, Joseph (1722-1800), critic, contributed 
literary criticisms to The Adventurer, 1753. 

Nineteenth Century 

Alcott, Amos Bronson (1799-1888), American, 
friend of Emerson; contributed to The Dial (see p. 
135 above). 

Bagehot, Walter (1826-1877), political econo- 
mist, literary critic. 

Besant, Sir Walter (1838-1901), novelist and 
critic. 

Brougham, Lord Henry (1778-1868), a founder 
of the Edinburgh Rcznew (see p. iii above), and one 
of its early contributors. 

Brown, Dr. John (1810-1882), Scotch surgeon 
and essayist; author of Rab and His Friends, 1859. 

Coleridge, Hartley (1796-1849), poet (son of 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge), and contributor to Black- 
mood's. 

Coleridge, Mary Elizabeth (1861-1907), poet, 
novelist, and essayist. 



202 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Curtis, George William (1824- 1892), American 
journalist and publicist; author of Prue and I, 1856, 
Potiphar Papers, 1856, etc. 

"Eliot, George" (Mary Ann Evans Cross), 
(1819-1880), novelist, author of miscellaneous essays, 
chiefly of a series entitled The Impressions of The- 
ophrastus Such, 1879. 

Fuller, (Sarah) Margaret ( 1810-1850), Ameri- 
can writer, first editor (1839^1842) of The Dial (see 
p. 135 above). 

Gladstone, William Ewart (1809- 1898), states- 
man, orator, and critic ; author of essays dealing with 
religious and classical subjects. 

Greeley, Horace (1811-1872), American journal- 
ist, author of various essays, mostly editorials, of great 
contemporary significance. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864), American 
novelist and short-story writer; included many essays 
in Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846, Our Old Home, 
1863, etc. 

HiGGiNsoN, Thomas Wentworth (1823-1911), 
American man of letters; author of Atlantic Essays, 
1 87 1, Cheer fid Yesterdays, 1898, etc. 

Holland, Dr. Josiah Gilbert (1819-1881), 
American editor and poet; wrote Timothy Titcomh's 
Letters, 1858, etc. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809-1894), American 
physician and poet; author of The Autocrat of the 
Breakfast Table, 1857- 1858, The Poet at the Break- 
fast Table, iS^y2, etc. 

Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-1895), scientist, 



APPENDIX 203 

writer, and lecturer on topics of scientific significance. 

Jefferies, Richard (1848-1887), author of vari- 
ous sketches of English rural life. 

Jeffrey, Lord Francis (1773-1850), judge and 
literary critic; founder (together with certain others, 
see p. Ill above) of Edinburgh Review; to it he con- 
tributed about two hundred articles. 

Landor, Walter Savage (i 775-1864), adventurer 
and man of letters; Imaginary Conversations, 1831, 
and numerous pro-Latin essays. 

Lanier, Sidney (i 842-1 881), American poet and 
lecturer; author of Science of English Verse, 1880. 

LocKHART, John Gibson (1794-1854), biographer 
of Sir Walter Scott, and contributor to the great Eng- 
lish (Reviews. 

Lowell, James Russell (1819-1891), American 
poet, critic, and essayist. 

M'Carthy, Justin (1830-1912), Irish journalist 
and novelist. 

Martineau, Harriet (1802-1876), author of seri- 
ous essays on miscellaneous topics. 

Mitford, Mary Russell (1787-1855), novelist and 
dramatist, author of neighborhood sketches entitled 
Our Village, 1824. 

More, Hannah (1745-1833), dramatist and novel- 
ist; wrote also a few essays. 

Norton, Charles Eliot (1827-1908), American 
scholar, editor, translator, and essayist; friend of 
Ruskin. 

Pater, Walter (Horatio) (1839-1894), subtle 
critic and stylist ; essays on classical subjects. 



264 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Paulding, James Kirke (1779-1860), American 
novelist and essayist ; friend of Washington Irving. 

PoE, Edgar Allan (1809- 1849), American poet 
and critic. 

Smiles, Samuel (1812-1904), biographer, author 
of Self -Help, 1859, and of similar books. 

Smith, Sydney (1771-1845), one of the founders 
of the Edinburgh Review (see p. iii above). 

SouTHEY, Robert (1774-1843), poet-laureate, bi- 
ographer, essayist, contributor to literary periodicals. 

Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903), philosopher, 
author of Education, 1861, and other serious essays. 

Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837-1909), 
poet and critical essayist. 

Symonds, John Addington (1840-1893), writer 
of critical essays, many of them dealing with the 
Renaissance. 

Thompson, Francis (1859-1907), poet and critic, 
contributor to literary critical periodicals. 

Thoreau, Henry David (1817-1862), American 
naturalist and radicalist; author of Walden Pond, 
1854, and other series of essays. 

Warner, Charles Dudley (1829-1900), Ameri- 
can writer of humorous essays. 

Whipple, Edwin Percy (1819-1886), American 
writer and lecturer. 

Willis, Nathaniel Parker (1806-1867), Ameri- 
can journalist and poet. 

Wilson, John ("Christopher, or Kjt, North") 
(1785-1854), noted Scotch contributor to Black- 
wood's. Nodes Ambrosianae, 1822-1835. 



APPENDIX III 

Contemporary Essayists 

Benson, Arthur Christopher (1862- ), es- 
sayist and poet; author of The House of Quiet, 1901, 
Beside Still Waters, 1907, etc. 

Birrell, Augustine (1850- ), long Chief Sec- 
retary for Ireland, essayist, and lecturer on literary 
topics. 

Briggs, LeBaron Russell (1855- ), Dean of 
the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Professor in 
Harvard University; author of School, College, and 
Character, 1901, and other volumes of essays. 

Bryce, James ( 1838- ), historian and diplomat. 

Burroughs, John (1837- ), American natural- 
ist and essayist. 

Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (1874- ), jour- 
nalist. 

Crothers, Samuel McChord (1857- ), Amer- 
ican Unitarian minister; author of The Gentle Reader, 
1903, The Pardoner's Wallet, 1905, etc. 

DoBSON, (Henry) Austin (1840- ), poet and 
essayist. 

DowDEN, Edward (1843- )> Professor of Eng- 
lish Literature in Dublin University, Shakespearean 
scholar, critical essayist. 

305 



206 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

GossE, Edmund (William) (1849- )» <^f Trin- 
ity College, Cambridge; critical essayist and poet. 

Harrison, Frederic ( 1831- ), scholar and pub- 
licist; critic of nineteenth century authors. 

HowELLS, William Dean (1837- ), American 
novelist, essayist, and critic ; contributes Editor's Easy 
Chair papers to Harpe/s Magazine. 

Lucas, Edward Verrall (1868- ), author of 
Over Bemerfon's, etc. 

Lynn, Margaret (1869- ), Professor of Eng- 
lish in the University of Kansas; contributor to At- 
lantic Monthly. 

Mabie, Hamilton Wright (1846- ), Ameri- 
can journalist and critic. 

Matthews, (James) Brander (1852- ), Pro- 
fessor of Dramatic Literature in Columbia University, 
contributor to current periodicals. 

MoRLEY, John, Lord (1838- ), statesman, bi- 
ographer, and literary critic. 

Perry, Bliss (i860- ), Professor of English 
Literature in Harvard University; former editor of 
Atlantic Monthly; author of Park Street Papers, Car- 
lyle: How to Know Him, etc. 

Repplier, Agnes (1858- ), American writer of 
essays dealing with topics of current interest. 

Saintsbury, George (Edward Bateman) (1845- 
), Professor of English in University of Edin- 
burgh, author of numerous critical essays. 

Wendell, Barrett (1855- ), Professor of 
English in Harvard University, writer on literary, na- 
tional, and international topics. 



APPENDJX 207 

Winter, William (1836- ), American dra- 
matic critic. 

WooDBERRY, George Edward ( 1855- ), Ameri- 
can poet and critic; Professor of Poetry in Columbia 
University. 

Yeats, William Butler (1865- ), Irish poet, 
dramatist, and literary critic. 



INDEX 



(For essayists not discussed in the text, see Ap- 
pendix II and Appendix III.) 



Abou Ben Adhem, y2. 
Addison, Joseph, 12-25 ; 

education, 15 ; The Cam- 
paign, 15; contributes to 
The Tatler, 1 5 ; contri- 
butions to The Specta- 
tor, 16; quarrel with 
Pope, 16; quarrel with 
Steele, 16; supplemented 
by Dr. Johnson, 27; 
quoted, 85. 

America, Hazlitt in, 49; 
ignorance concerning, 
58; visits of Thackeray 
to, 159; visit of Arnold 
to, 173- 

American Scholar, The, 
149. 

Apologia pro vita sua, 132. 

Arnold, Matthew, 172-185 ; 
education, 173; industry, 
173; Professor of Poet- 
ry, 173 ; critical writings, 
173; visit to America, 
173 ; sudden death, 173 ; 
characterization, 174; a 
professional critic, 174; 
his criticism of Emerson, 
175 ; his purpose in criti- 
cism, 178; Philistinism, 



181; "culture," 184; his 
definition of the "mod- 
ern spirit," 185. 

Arnold, Dr. Thomas, 172. 

Arts and Crafts, 163. 

Autobiography of Leigh 
Hunt, 74, 77, 81. 

Bacon, Sir Francis, 4-9; 

his Essays, 5-6, 8-9; his 
relation to Montaigne, 
5-6; as a statesman, 7; 
as philosopher and scien- 
tist, 8; as historian, 8; 
emulated by Emerson, 
135-136. 

Bagehot, Walter, 46. 

Beggar's Opera, The, 22 
(note), 29. 

Bennett, Mr. Arnold, 58. 

Bergson, M., 140. 

Bickerstaff, Isaac, 17. 

Birrell, Mr. Augustine 
(quoted), 44. 

Bleak House, 78. 

Blumine, 99. 

Book review type of es- 
says, iio-iii; also Ap- 
pendix I. 

Bracebridge Hall, 68, icx). 



209 



210 



INDEX 



Brantwood, 171. 

Bronte, Charlotte, 154, 155. 

Brougham, Lord, 1 1 1 ; also 

Appendix II. 
Brown, Charles Brockden, 

59. 

Bulwer-Lytton, Sir Ed- 
ward, 156. 

Burns, Robert, 48. 

Byron, Lord, yy. 

C a r 1 y 1 e , Mrs. (Jane 
Welsh), 102, 105. 

Carlyle, Thomas* 95-125; 
his opinion of Lamb, 42 ; 
his description of Lamb, 
44 ; and Lamb, 45 ; and 
Hazlitt, 46 ; his character- 
ization of Hunt, 72; his 
description of DeQuin- 
cey, 86; actual condition 
of England not reflected 
in works of other writ- 
ers, 95 ; the real condi- 
tion, 96; earnestness of 
Carlyle, 97 ; influence 
upon John Ruskin, 97; 
testimony of Emerson, 
97; parentage and edu- 
cation, 98; suflfering and 
uncertainty in youth, 99 ; 
"conversion," 100; de- 
termination to write, 
lOi ; tutoring and travel- 
ing, 102 ; met Lamb and 
others, 102; his opinion 
of them, 102; transla- 
tions, 102 ; recognition 
from Goethe, 102; mar- 
ried Jane Welsh, 102 ; at 



Craigenputtock, 103; pe- 
riodical essays, 103 ; 
method of writing, 103; 
Sartor Resartus pub- 
lished, 103 ; reception, 
104 ; removal to Chelsea, 
104; other writings, 104; 
On Heroes, etc., 104; 
influence — C r o m w e 1 1, 
105; Rector of Edin- 
burgh University, 105 ; 
death of Mrs. Carlyle, 
106; his Reminiscences, 
106; head of English let- 
ters, 106; failing powers, 
106; friends, 106; burial 
at Ecclefechan, 106; na- 
ture of his message, 107- 
1 10 ; the Real beyond the 
Apparent, 108 ; Hero- 
worship, 108; literature, 
108; changed our con- 
ceptions of Mahomet 
and of Cromwell, 109; 
discredited various re- 
forms, 109; summary, 
109 ; and Montaigne, 
no; and Macaulay, on 
History, 120; and New- 
man, 125-126; and Em- 
erson, 136, 145, 148,150; 
and Thackeray, 154; and 
Ruskin, 162, 169, 171 ; 
and Arnold, 174, 175, 
179, 185; and Philistin- 
ism, 181. 

Citizen of the World 
(Chinese Letters), 32, 
33. 

Coleridge, 37, 41, 50. 



INDEX 



211 



Contemporary Essayists, 
see Appendix III. 

Cornhill Magazine, 117, 
160, 169, 190. 

Cowley, Abraham, 9- 11; 
nature of his essays, 9, 
10, II; education, etc., 
10 ; retirement, 1 1 ; posi- 
tion, II. 

Cynic, Thackeray as a, 152- 
157. 

Defoe, Daniel, 17, 89; also 

Appendix 11. 
DeQuincey, Thomas, 84- 

94;. 

autobiographical nature 
of his work, 86; Car- 
lyle's description of, 86; 
early life, 86-87; opium 
taking, 87 ; eccentricities, 
87 ; why remembered, 
88-94; not for message, 
88 ; not for style, 89 ; not 
for humor, 89-90; a lit- 
erary artisan, 90; super- 
lative human attributes, 
91-94 ; vast knowledge, 
91 ; marvelous memory, 
91 ; richness of (psycho- 
logical) associations, 92 ; 
facility of expression, 
93 ; his impassioned 
prose, 94; contrast to 
Carlyle, 95, 100; and 
Ruskin, 168. 

Deserted Village, The, 31, 
58. 

Dickens, Charles, 58, 69, 
78, 156, 159, 165. 



Disraeli, Benjamin, 106, 
156. 

Divinity School (Har- 
vard) Address, Emer- 
son's, 149. 

Dryden, John, 11, 48; also 
Appendix II. 

Edinburgh, 187. 

Edinburgh Review, 102, 
III, 119, 146. 

Edwards, Jonathan, 150. 

Eighteenth Century Essay- 
ists of minor importance 
as such, see Appendix 
II. 

Elective system, 138. 

Elegy Written in a Country 
Churchyard, 29. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 

135-150; 
on Montaigne, 2, 3; ap- 
proved of Sartor, 104; 
opinion of Frederick the 
Great, 105 ; friend of 
Carlyle, 106; characteri- 
zation of Macaulay, 121 ; 
desire to write a Sequel 
to Bacon, 136; as a 
preacher in the "church 
of letters," 137 ; influence 
upon education, 138; dit- 
to upon scholarship, 139; 
"Hitch your wagon to a 
star !" 141 ; Lowell's 
characterization of, 142; 
parentage and education, 
142-143 ; his Journal, 
143; as a minister, 144; 
reasons for leaving min- 



212 



INDEX 



istry, 143-144 ; visit to Eu- 
rope, 147; lecturing and 
writing, 148; and Car- 
lyle, 150; popularity at 
last, 150; his death, 150; 
his position, 150; and 
Ruskin, 172; Arnold's 
criticism of, 175-177. 

Epistles of Seneca, i, 5 
(note). 

Esmond, Henry, portray- 
al of Steele in, 14. 

Essais of Montaigne, 1-4, 
5, no, 112, 151. 

Essays 

Origin, etc., i ; nature, 3- 
4; meaning of term, 6; 
influence of Steele and 
Addison upon, 13, 21, 
24; influence of Dr. 
Johnson upon, 27-30 ; in- 
fluence of Goldsmith 
upon, 34 ; "objective" es- 
says, 110-112; kinds of, 
see Appendix I. 

Essays of Elia, 38, 43, 95, 
102. 

Examiner, The, 75. 

Fable for Critics, A, 71, 

142. 
Fichte, 107 (note). 
Fielding, Henry, 159; also 

Appendix II, 
F 1 o r i o ' s translation of 

Montaigne, i, 4 (note). 
Franklin, Benjamin, 48, 

49; also Appendix II. 
Eraser's Magazine, 103, 

169. 



Froude, 106. 

Gay (quoted), 22. 

Goethe, 102, 137, 175, 185. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, 30-34; 
autobiographical p a s - 
sages in works, 31-32; 
boyhood and education, 
31-32; Continental ex- 
periences, 32 ; member 
of Dr. Johnson's Club, 
32 ; epitaph in Westmin- 
ster Abbey, 33 ; as an es- 
sayist, 2,Z-2>A', Life hy Ir- 
ving, 54; ignorance of 
America, 58 ; and Thack- 
eray, 159. 

Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 191 ; 
also Appendix III. 

Griffiths, publisher of 
Monthly Review, 32. 

Harrison, Mr. Frederic, 
118; also Appendix III. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 82, 
83, 84, 189 ; also Appen- 
dix II. 

Hazlitt, William, 45-57 ; 
contrasted with Lamb, 
46; Carlyle's opinion of, 
also Stevenson's and 
Lamb's, 46; his times as 
explaining his character, 
47-49; early life of, 49; 
reading, 50; and Cole- 
ridge, 50; as a painter, 
51 ; and Lamb, 51 ; early 
literary efforts, 52; the 
Round Table, 52; quar- 
rel with Gifford, 53; his 



INDEX 



213 



pleasure in hating, 54; 
breach with Hunt, 54; 
barbed thrusts in his 
writings, 54-55 ; other 
quarrels, 55; last words, 
56 ; attitude toward 
America, 54, 58; and 
Hunt, 76; his Ignorance 
of the Learned, 139-140; 
as a "Good night" au- 
thor, 152. 

Henley, W. E., 190. 

Henry, Patrick, 58. 

Hoffman, Miss Matilda, 

65, 71. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 
152; also Appendix H, 

Honeycomb, Will, 20, 30. 

Howell's Letters, 151. 

Hunt, Leigh, 71-84; 
and the Round Table, 
52; breach with Hazlitt, 
54; elements in charac- 
ter, 72-75; father, 73; 
mother, 73-74; religious 
views, 75 ; early life and 
writings, 75 ; The Exam- 
iner, 76; Prince Regent 
affair, 76; Keats and 
Shelley, y6, 84; poems, 
etc., 76; Autobiography, 
yy; Italian venture, yy ; 
breach with Dickens, 78 ; 
character, 78-84; sensi- 
tiveness, 79 ; optimism, 
80-81 ; Carlyle and, 84 ; 
influence, 84; and Rus- 
kin, 164. 

Hyde, President William 
DeWitt, 140. 



Idler, The, papers by Dr. 
Johnson, 26. 

Irving, Washington, 57-71 ; 
his Life of Goldsmith, 54 ; 
anecdote concerning, 57; 
name, 57; prevailing ig- 
norance concerning 
America, 58; the Sketch 
Book well known, 57, 
59; birth and boyhood, 
59-60 ; education and 
early writing, 61-62 ; 
visit to Europe, 61 ; law 
student, etc., 62; Salma- 
gundi, 62 ; Knickerbock- 
er History, 63-65 ; Miss 
Hoffman, 65 ; business 
trip to England, ^-y Eu- 
ropean sojourn, 66-68; 
writing and publication 
of The Sketch Book 
67 ; other writings, 68ff. 
return to America, 68 
Sunnyside, 69; honored 
by Dickens, 69; minister 
to Spain, 69; death, 69; 
permanency of writings, 
70; and Carlyle, 95. 

James, Henry, 58. 

James, William, 150. 

Jane Eyre, 153. 

Jeffrey, Lord Francis, 56, 
III; also Appendix H. 

Joan of Arc, 86. 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 25- 
30; 
testimony of as to influ- 
ence of The Spectator, 
24; treated here only as 



214 



INDEX 



an essayist, 25 ; birth 
and characteristics, 26 ; 
goes to London, 26; his 
Dictionary, 26 ; The 
Rambler, etc., 26 ; Ras\se- 
las, 2^; the Qub, 27; 
Li/e by Boswell, 27; in- 
fluence upon essay, 2y- 
30; in fiction, 31. 
Journal des savants, iii 
(note). 

Keats, John, 76, 84. 

Keble, John, 128. 

Kinds of essays, I28ff. ; 

also Appendix I. 
Kingsbridge, New York, 

64. 
Kingsley, Charles, 132. 
Knickerbocker, Diedrich, 

and his History of New 

York, 64-65, 70. 

Lamb, Charles, 35-45 ; 

and Mary Lamb, 35-36; 
discouragements, 36-38 ; 
The Old Familiar Faces, 
37 ; cheerfulness and 
heroism, 38; newspaper 
writing, 38-39; punning, 
40; anecdotes, 41, 155.; 
opinion of Carlyle con- 
cerning, 42; ditto of 
Professor Winchester, 
42 ; variety of his essays, 
43 ; Carlyle's description 
of, 44; "Poor Charles 
Lamb!" 44; portrait by 
Hazlitt, 51 ; friend of 
Hazlitt, 51; and Irving, 



66, 70; favorite among 
Hunt's essays, 81 ; Car- 
lyle's first opinion of, 
102. 
Lamb, Mary, 35, 36, 41, 

44, 155- 

Lloyd, friend of Charles 
Lamb, 37. 

London Magazine, 47, 102. 

Lowell, his characteriza- 
tion of Irving, 71 ; of 
Emerson, 142 ; and 
Thackeray, 159; also 
Appendix II. 

Macaulay, Thomas Bab- 
ington, 1 12-122; 
his brilliant career, 113; 
parentage and education, 
114; precocity, 114; 
memory, 114; first pub- 
lic speech, 115; Milton 
essay published, 115; 
other speeches, 115; the 
Lays, 115; History of 
England, 115; civil and 
political activity, 116; 
moral integrity, 116; 
method of composition, 
116; sudden death, 117; 
why not among the 
greatest, 1 17-122; too 
great regard for eflfec- 
tiveness, 117; and Car- 
lyle, on History, 120; 
Emerson's characteriza- 
tion of, 121 ; contrast to 
Newman, 125 ; and Rus- 
kin, 164. 

Man in Black, The, 30, 31. 



INDEX 



2IS 



Minor Essayists, 1 1 ; also 

Appendix II. 
Mitchell, Dr. Samuel, and 

his Picture of New 

York, 63. 
Montaigne, Michel de, 

originator of modern es- 
say, I ; purpose in writ- 
ing, 2; character, 2; 
motto, 2 ; Emerson's es- 
timate of, 2-3 ; and Ba- 
con, 5, 6; and Cowley, 
10; and Addison and 
Steele, 21 ; and Carlyle, 
no; and Thackeray, 151. 

Newman, John Henry, 
Cardinal, 122-134; 

wrote objective essays, 
112; similarity to Car- 
lyle, 124; attitude to- 
ward matters of religion, 
124; and Carlyle, 125; 
endurance of criticism, 
126; early notions of re- 
ligion, 127; progress at 
Oxford, 127 ; Continen- 
tal tour, 128 ; Lead, 
Kindly Light, 128; the 
Oxford Movement, 129; 
Tracts for the Times, 
129 ; results of the move- 
ment, 129; Tract go, 
130 ; enters Catholic 
communion, 130; gener- 
al contempt for, 130; 
friends — effect of Achil- 
li suit, 130; Rector of 
University of Dublin, 



131 ; lectures. Idea of a 
University, 131 ; quarrel 
with Kingsley, 132 ; 
Apologia, 132; attacked 
by Gladstone, 132; Let- 
ter to the Duke of Nor- 
folk, 133; honors, 133; 
death, 133 ; effect of 
teachings, 133-134. 

Nineteenth Century essay- 
ists of minor importance, 
see Appendix II. 

Objective (essays), 86, 
1 10- 1 12; also Appendix 
I. 

Oldstyle, Jonathan, 61. 

On Murder, etc., 86. 

Origin of modern essays, i. 

Oxford Movement, 129. 

Pamela, 30. 

Pensions, old age, 163, 170. 

Periodical essays, influence 
of Defoe upon, 17 ; ditto 
of Steele and Addison, 
21 ; ditto of Dr. Johnson, 
27-30; ditto of Oliver 
Goldsmith, 34. 

Perry, Professor Bliss, 
105 ; also Appendix III. 

Pickwick Papers, 158. 

Plain Speaker, The, 56. 

Pre-Raphaelites, the, 163, 
168. 

Prescott, William H., 69. 

Prince Regent affair, ^6, 
81. 

Punch, 152, 159. 

Rambler, The, 26, 2^, 29. 



2l6 



INDEX 



Rasselas, 2.y. 

Reform Bill of 1832, 128. 

Revieiv, Defoe's, 17. 

Richter, Jean Paul Fried- 
rich, 102, 107 (note). 

Round Table, 52, 56, y6. 

Royce, Professor Josiah, 
150. 

Ruskin, John, 161-172; 
influenced by Carlyle, 
97 ; held in low esteem 
by many, 162 ; influence, 
163; characterization, 
164; art studies, 165; 
and Dickens, 165 ; inheri- 
tance and childhood, 106 ; 
education, 166; Modern 
Painters, 167; impas- 
sioned prose, 167; other 
works, 168; as an art 
collector, 168; as an ar- 
tist, 168; marriage, 168; 
social service activity, 
170; further writings, 
170; principles, 170; ex- 
periments, 170; Slade 
Professor of Fine Arts, 
170; Whistler episode, 
170 ; resignation, 171; 
Brantwood, 171 ; death 
and burial, 171 ; com- 
pared with Carlyle and 
Emerson, 171-172; and 
Arnold, 174, 185. 

Salmagundi, 62. 

Scandalous Club, in De- 
foe's Review, 17, 21. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 56, 65, 
66, 114, 115, 155, 187. 



Seneca, his Epistles, i, 5 
(note). 

Seventeenth Century essay- 
ists of minor importance, 
1 1 ; also Appendix II. 

Shakespeare, i, 96. 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, y6, 

77, 84. 
She Stoops to Conquer, 29, 

.32. 

Sir Roger, 20, 30. 

Sketch Book, The, 57, 59, 
67. 

Skimpole, Harold, 78. 

Smith, Sydney, 1 1 1 ; also 
Appendix II. 

Spectator, The, 13, 19-24, 
26, 52. 

Steele, Sir Richard, 13-15 i 
16-25; 
education, 13; play- 
wright and gazetteer, 14 ; 
issues The Tatler, 14; 
issues The Spectator, 14 ; 
breach with Addison, 
16; supplemented by Dr. 
Johnson, 29 ; in fiction, 

14, 36. 
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 
185-194; 

contrasted with New- 
man, 124; characteriza- 
tion, 186; Edinburgh as 
a cradle of romance, 
187; other romantic in- 
fluences, 188; as an en- 
gineer, 189; as a literary 
apprentice, and lawyer, 
i8g; An Inland Voyage, 
190; Travels With a 



INDEX 



217 



Donkey, 190; other es- 
say-writings, etc., 190 ; 
love affair, 190; illness, 
191 ; literary success, 
192 ; Vailima, Tusitala, 
192; fortitude and in- 
dustry, 193 ; death, 193 ; 
burial and epitaph, 194. 

Subjective (essays), 5, 
112; also Appendix I. 

Sunnyside, 69. 

Swift, Jonathan, 17, 18, 
99, 184; also Appendix 
II. 

Table Talk, 56. 
Tales of a Traveller, 68. 
Tales of the Alhambra, 68. 
Tatler, The, 16-25. 
Tatler, The, Leigh Hunt's, 

77- 

Templar, The, 20. 

Thackeray, William 
Makepeace, 151-161 ; 
his picture of Steele, 14 ; 
as a ''Good night" au- 
thor, 151 ; no cynic, 152- 
153; as a "social regen- 
erator," 153; serious pur- 
pose of, 154; examples 
of method, 156; early 
Hfe, 158; early literary 
efforts, 159; success of 
Vanity Fair, 159; other 
novels, 159; lectures in 



America, 159; breach 
with Dickens, 160; edi- 
tor of Cornhill Maga- 
zine, 160; death, 160; 
and Ruskin, 169. 

Tibbs, Beau, 30. 

Tom, Jones, 30. 

Tracts for the Times, 129. 

Tract go, 130. 

Traveller, The, 32. 

Trivia, 22 (note), 29. 

Turner, J. M. W., 163, 167, 
168. 

Unto This Last, 165, 169. 

Vanity Fair, 154, 156, 159. 
Vicar of Wakeiield, 32. 
Vocational training, 163. 
Von Ranke's History of 
the Popes, 118. 

War, 163. 

Washington, Booker T., 58. 

Washington, George, 57, 

58. 
Whistler, James MacNeil, 

170. 
Winchester, Professor C. 

T., 42 (and note), 84. 
Wolfert's Roost, 69. 
Wordsworth, William, 50, 

51. 147- 
Works of the Learned, 
III. 



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